Agile Hacks - The Sand Timers

In a series of articles, I hope to share some of the tools I use to help our agile teams do their work. Some of those tools are things evolved from established agile methods and others are simply things that could be applied to any team, agile or otherwise.

Let me start with a story. I was invited to a management meeting at a large company to talk about my latest findings on a project I was working on. As I was about to start my presentation I was informed by one of the managers that he was assigned to be the time keeper. His responsibility was to make sure that I only talked for the allocated 20 minutes I was given. “Sure, no problem,” I thought as I started.

About five minutes into my presentation he suddenly yells “Fifteen minutes left!!” as I was right in the middle of a sentence. Baffled by this interruption I soon managed to pick up the thread again. This was of course repeated only a couple of minutes later, much to the amusement of the other managers. It soon became apparent that the attendees were more interested in waiting for the next status report than to listen to what I had to say. Six or seven interruptions later I was done with my presentation and unsurprisingly no one had any follow-up questions.

This was obviously this management team’s way of making sure that their meetings were kept on time. I can only imagine how long their meetings were before someone came up with this brilliant idea. Joking aside, there are hopefully better ways to do this and I am about to present you with an alternative solution.

I have been using this method for our Sprint Demo sessions where the team members present their solutions to the Product Owner and other stakeholders. As the meeting starts I bring forth a set of sand timers with varying durations and let the presenters decide on who gets which sand timer. Whenever someone starts they flip their sand timer and use that as a reference for how long their presentation should last. As they wrap up the next person in the room takes over. This continues until all sand timers have been flipped.

There are a couple of things to consider. You should only cover about 22 minutes for every half-an-hour to cover up for all the slack time between presentations. Also, never interrupt someone whose sand timer has expired. They will notice themselves or someone will politely point towards the sand timer. The sand timer fulfills two purposes: (1) it gives the presenter a rough idea of how much time is left and (2) it gives the listeners a sense of how long the presentation will last. This way they will know how long their attention span needs to be and can keep their focus on listening to what is actually being said.

While I have been using this method in Sprint Demos it can really be applied to any meeting where more than one participant is expected to hold a presentation. Part of the solution is to let the presenters themselves fight for the sand timers which will make them well aware of how scarce the total time of the meeting really is. People will soon learn to keep their sessions short and concise which means no one will be forced to forego their presentation because of the meeting running out of time.

So far, all meetings where I have used the sand timers have ended on time.