The only practice that I've found to be reliably agile is simply having more one-on-one meetings and less large group meetings. Large group meetings tend to waste time for at least some of the people in the group. Often, if you get 8 people together, most of the conversation is between 3 or 4 of those people, while the other 4 or 5 are bored and disengaged. One on one meetings tend to be productive since the meeting would not happen unless one of those people needed to talk to the other person, so 100% of the people in attendance are needed in that meeting. (I'm excluding those companies that have mandatory one-on-one meetings, where the mandatory nature of the meeting sometimes makes the meeting as useless as a large group meeting.)<p>I've known managers who say "Group meetings are great because I get to meet with everyone at once and it saves me so much time!" But that only benefits the manager. Meanwhile some of the people in the meeting are just sitting there, killing time, bored, waiting for the manager to have 10 minutes to talk to them. By contrast, more one-on-one meetings, even if only for 10 minutes, allows everyone to be involved during the moments when they need to be involved.<p>When we criticize some of the rituals and bureaucracy that has become associated with the word "agile" most of the time we are criticizing group meetings. That includes the daily standup. I've run teams successfully by having quick one-on-one 10 minute meetings with everyone on my team, everyday. But I rarely feel the need to get the whole team together. In fact, when I'm leading a large team, I never need to get the whole team together, it is always some smaller subset that I pull together.<p>If you are the team leader, then you need to think carefully about who you need to talk to for any given purpose. If you have the discipline to only talk to the minimum set of people you need to talk to, then you are freeing up a lot of people to keep working on their real work, since they are not in a meeting with you.