It just needs to work [Tools]
One thing that can render any perfectly executed SCRUM planning session useless, is a broken development environment.
Once the backlog has been prioritized, and the team had generated a sensable amount of stories and tasks, teams are energized to start moving those tasks to complete. What is lost when that developer goes back to their desk to find themselves without a db to code against or a login server that just doesent work? A Lot!
What we stand to loose
Sure we all know that these type of outages will cost us backlog, which will translate to time subtracted from our sprint. But what we should fear more is the loss of the momentum that the developer had when he/she finished sprint planning. The developer is now frustrated and will likely not find that lost level of inspiration again. At least not easily. Lets be honest, a developer has very few actual hours of productive time in a work day. Take an avarage 8 hour day and subtract meeting, email, IM, and phone distractions. Lets also consider that most people need a fair amount of time of immersion to reach their most creative state.
Tools make all the difference
All of our distractions require us rely on our tools to be there and ready to go when we need them. This means that we need to spend some serious time planning our tools and how each developer will interact with them through out the sprint. Designers shouldn’t need to interact with code to create designs. Back-End engineers shouldn’t need to hassle with CSS. Also, Front-End engineers shouldn’t need to configure XML files and compile. We have the technology available to make real use of the MVC pattern yet I have witnessed a lot of projects start out with the assumption that everybody can easily run that ANT script or whatever. I can also say that every time I have see this I have seen time being wasted on complex troubleshooting by smart Front-End Engineers and Designers that have been reduced terrible Java troubleshooters.
What to do? What to do?
Excuse my possible ignorance, but in projects where the heavy lifting was done by java and accessed through the magic of web services by clients written in PHP or Ruby on Rails. It cant be a coincidence that these projects had far fewer wasted hours. The pieces are smaller and easier to manage. Each person is working on a smaller chunk of the bigger project that he/she understands enough to easily fix problems. I am sure that somebody would argue that there is far too much processing overhead in such a configuration but i wonder how that weighs against the lost time and creativity without it.