Protect developers from unnecessary distrations

These are my favorite quotes from the book, Debugging the Development Process, from Steve Maguire:

"Any work that does not result in an improved product is potentially wasted or misguided effort."


"I've found that groups regularly get into trouble because programmers are doing work they shouldn't be doing. They're spending too much time preparing for meetings, going to meetings, summarizing meetings, writing status reports, and answering emails."

"The project lead should ruthlessly eliminate any obstacles that keep the developers from the truly important work: improving the product"





Without having people in the same room or in the same call, how can we coordinate among different teams?  However, it seems that having everybody waiting for their turn could be very ineffective.

Perhaps that we just need to alert people right before their turn?

Maybe this is a typical queuing and scheduling issue?