Nobody repealed it. There was no meeting about ending it and no announcement. It was simply true in week two, mostly true in week five, and by week nine the people who were there when it was announced had stopped mentioning it, because mentioning it made them the difficult one. ...
A meeting budget works when it caps the team’s recurring load, counts in person-hours, and has one named person who says no when it is spent. It fails when it is written as a per-person quota, because then the person with the least power in the room is the one who runs out of budget first and has to decline a director to stay inside it. ...
Before you write a core hours policy, do the arithmetic. A team spread across four time zones from Central Europe to the US west coast has, on a standard nine-to-five, no overlap at all — not a narrow window, none — and the policy you are able to write is decided entirely by that number rather than by what you would prefer. Teams skip the arithmetic, announce core hours of 10:00 to 15:00 in a time zone nobody names, and find out in week two that it means 06:00 for one person and 22:00 for another. ...