Orbital cut its weekly sync to eleven minutes

Orbital's Monday sync was ninety minutes and thirty-one people. Most of it was status: eleven teams saying what they had done, to an audience who mostly needed to know about one of them.

The page came first

The first change had nothing to do with agents. Every team got one page and a rule: the page is written by Friday, the meeting is for what the page could not settle.

This half-worked, in the way it half-works everywhere. Pages got written; nobody read them; the meeting stayed ninety minutes because the first twenty went on catching people up.

Writing it down was never the problem. Reading eleven pages on a Monday morning was the problem.

Then the summary agent

Orbital's operations team wrote a note at the top of the sync page — summarise the eleven team pages, lead with what changed and what slipped — and left it there permanently. An agent picks it up at 06:00 every Monday.

The summary is one page. It cites every claim back to the team page it came from, so anyone who cares about a line can open the source in one click. It goes out at 06:15.

What the meeting is now

Eleven minutes, and it is genuinely a different meeting. The agenda is whatever people left notes on in the summary between six and nine, which is usually two or three real disagreements.

• Ninety minutes to eleven, measured over six months
• Thirty-one attendees to nine, with the rest reading the page
• Around 470 hours a year given back, on Orbital's own arithmetic

The number Rowan Ellery quotes is the headcount one: the operations coordinator role they were about to open was the person who would have been assembling that summary by hand.