I get this question often, especially for teams that are starting up in Scrum. Given that there are meetings in every short iteration, it can feel like a lot at first. Let’s look at the standard meetings that are part of the Scrum framework which include Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review/Demo and Sprint Retrospective. In addition to those, most teams will also include another meeting to help build and maintain their Product Backlog called Backlog Grooming.  So it would appear there are a lot of meetings. But how long do these meeting typically last? Given a two-week sprint (80 working hours), here is a breakdown of average time given my experience with teams: Sprint Planning – 3 hours, Daily Scrum – 15 min/day * 10 days = 1.5 hours, Sprint Review/Demo – 1 hour, Sprint Retrospective – 2 hours and Backlog Grooming – 2 hours. That comes to a total time of 9.5 hours and leaves the team with over 70 hours of time to work on their sprint, right? So out of every 10 days, about 15% or a little over a day is spend on meetings. This doesn’t seem so bad!

So if isn’t really a big percentage of the team’s time, why do people feel this way? Primarily because they don’t see the value of those meetings or those meetings aren’t as efficient as they could be. Or, it could be that this just adds to the array of other meetings that people go to. There are ways that you can add value to those activities while reducing waste in how those meetings are ran. Here are some ideas:

• Prepare ahead for those meetings – Publish an agenda as well as the stories that are being considered in planning or grooming meetings.  If team members have a chance to review, they may be able to think ahead of what questions they have and be more prepared for those meetings.  For the ScrumMaster as facilitator, they need to mentally prepare themselves for how to keep the meetings moving and focused.
• Focus on the goals of these meetings and not the meetings themselves – While I have a standard agenda for these meetings and others do as well on how these meetings should run, it’s more important to understand what the outcomes are for these meetings.  Let’s go through the meetings and their purpose:  Sprint Planning – break down backlog items into work that the team will accomplish during the sprint and get to a good enough plan that the team can together make a commitment; Daily Scrum – review team progress to date and determine if the team will make their commitment for the sprint and if not, what is slowing them down to stopping their progress by identifying impediments; Sprint Review/Demo – Review what was done and show what was done through working software, Talk about what did not get done and why; Sprint Retrospective – Knowing what we know as a team and have learned over the last sprint, how do we make the next sprint better; Backlog Grooming – Does the team understand how to get started with the next priorities and are the backlog items of the right size to fit into the upcoming sprint?  If you understand the goals, you might find ways to accomplish these goals in less time and less formal.  The purpose is to accomplish the goals, not just to go through the exercises.
• Improve your ability to facilitate those meetings – Jean Tabaka has a great book out called “Collaboration Explained“.  This book is focused about how ScrumMasters need to become better faciliators to effectively get the team to collaborate, communicate and achieve the goals of the various Scrum activities.  She provides the techniques and artifacts needed to ensure that the meeting starts well, goes efficiently, and ends crisply.
• Determine the value of other meetings by having these meetings be effective – People tend to hate meetings because they have no purpose, they take too much time, and nothing really good comes out of them (other than perhaps more meetings!).   If the meetings can provide value, and not be considered a waste of time then people will want to have them.  If the meetings are supporting or improving people’s work instead of taking time away from their “real work”, then they will start to distinquish the bad meetings from the good ones and either make the bad meetings better or get rid of them altogether.

Tags: facilitation, meetings, Scrum, ScrumMaster

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