Demystifying Scrum - Part 4 - Meetings
Scrum Myth #3: There are too many meetings in Scrum!
Welcome back! This is the fourth episode of a series of articles where I'm trying to demystify Scrum by debunking some of the most common misconceptions about Scrum itself and the Agile methodologies in general.
In case you missed them, here are the first three episodes:
In episode three, we discovered that Scrum is all about planning. In fact, planning is the main reason for all Scrum Events. I’ve already mentioned them briefly:?
Then, some of you might have heard something about?
Since this isn't a Scrum crash course, I'm not dwelling on the ins and outs of these events, but this list of events brings us to another very common objection about Scrum:
“We cannot waste all that time in meetings! When are we supposed to do our real job?”
Ok, this is a valid argument, in theory.?I appreciate that seeing all those meetings lined up in a rigid schedule might be frightening.
Except, the main reason of this structure is to save time and focus on the "real work"(TM). Whatever it means. Another reason is to make meetings more effective, which is an even more important issue, IMO, since poorly organized meetings are a huge source of inefficiency and waste, as well as one of the most frustrating ways to spend your time.
But let’s talk about time first.?Can you guess how much time Scrum reserves for meetings?
Let’s analyse the time allocation for a typical two-week Sprint, according to the Scrum Guide:?
So now that we've lined up the numbers we can do the math: can you guess how much it is, as a percentage of your working hours?
It’s 12.5% of your available time.
It is not that much after all when you put it this way, huh?
Plus, 4 hours for planning might seem a lot: "Half a day?? You've got to be kidding me!", snapped a friend last time we discussed this a few days ago. But think about it from a different perspective: how many micro-interactions would you need if your team didn't have a solid and shared understanding of what has to be done? Phone calls, Slack messages, emails... Context switching might cost you a lot more, if you need to continuously interrupt what you're doing to clarify small things in "micro-meetings". There's a lot of very well established evidence that every time you interrupt what you're doing, it may take up to 20 minutes to get back "in the zone". Just google "context switching productivity" to find tons of scary stuff about this. Scrum doesn't prevent you to jump into additional meetings when needed, but the way the Scrum events are organized makes it a lot less likely that you need them.
But it doesn't stop here. It gets even better: because 12.5% isn't the minimum amount of time, nor the average amount of time. It is the maximum amount of time that Scrum prescribes the meetings can last. That’s a hard limit. This means that in Scrum you spend at most 12.5% of your time in meetings or, if you're one of those weird people who always see the glass half full (I think they call 'em "optimists" or something), it means that Scrum guarantees that you’ll be spending at least 87.5% of your time doing “actual work”. Not that bad, if you ask me.
This happens because meetings in scrum are time-boxed: they cannot, under any circumstances, take longer than the prescribed amount of time. But if they’re led in the right way they can take a lot shorter.?
In a project I'm currently working at, we’re using two-weeks sprints, and we closed the last sprint planning in less than two hours. Why? Because we keep our backlog clean and tidy by often discussing prioritization with the customer, and we ask a lot of feedback from them, so it’s easy to figure out exactly what to do, and we don’t have to rework anything because we know that we only work on stuff that is important for the Customer.
Actually, the meetings being time-boxed is a huge incentive to improve the way you lead them. Since Scrum is based on empiricism, it deals with the fact that we all know too well that human beings are very bad at meetings, and meetings have the natural tendency to go south very fast if you don’t have constraints. Hence, the first constraint that Scrum applies to meetings is time, although it’s not the only one.?
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After a while the Scrum Team tend to significantly shorten the meetings and make them more effective just because they gradually improve the process. Remember the "inspect, learn, adapt" loop Scrum is based on? Yeah, that stuff works.
Now I need you to answer a question: are you sure you have spent less than 12.5% of your time in meetings last month? Or last week. Or the month before? No cheating, please. I don’t think so.?I see people drowning in a back-to-back meeting-pocalypse every day, to the point that some of 'em even mistake that dreadful ordeal for a measure of their success or positive contribution to the Company.
And time constraints aren't the whole story either. It gets better again!
Let’s talk about effectiveness. After all, even 12.5% of your time is valuable and you don’t want to waste it if it’s not useful (yep: muda).
We said that Scrum enforces a quantitative constraints on meetings, namely time constraints. But it doesn’t stop there. It also enforces qualitative constraints.
I need you to answer a second question, now: think about all the meetings you attended last month. How effective have they been? Before joining the meeting, did you always know what the meeting was about? And what the outcome was supposed to be? And were all the people in the meeting actually useful?
During my career I've identified three classes of infamous meeting syndromes that destroy productivity, and I regard them as huge red flags of highly dysfunctional processes. This is the list, in increasing order of annoyingness:
The Seance Meeting Syndrome:
Fifteen to twenty-something people are invited, half of them you never heard of. You have no idea whatsoever of what they do for a living, let alone why they’re here. All but a couple of them are in ghost-mode, with their mics and cameras off. They never talk, or chat, or interact in any way... They might as well be cooking, or walking their dog, or even dead for that matter, and nobody would notice. This is a huge waste of resources: their Company is paying those people to sit behind a muted microphone instead of doing their actual work. Or maybe is the other way around: they're doing their actual work while pretending to attend a meeting they have nothing to do with. Both ways, my question is: Why? Mostly, I suspect, because when some people call a meeting they don’t really know what the meeting is all about. More often than not, it’s just “let’s talk about the project” without a method, without a real focus on an actionable goal.
The Inception Meeting Syndrome:
Meetings to decide when to have a meeting, anyone? Meetings to decide what the next meeting is gonna be about? Meetings to prepare other meetings? Meetings with no clear output? Meetings you suddenly find yourself in without really remembering how or why? Meetings that go rogue without any fathomable reason, diverging completely from the original topic??I know you know what I'm talking about. There are a couple of signs you can use to tell whether you're in one of these bubbles of twisted reality: the time ticks slower, the feeling of unreality grows larger and larger, you start longing for someone to wake you up, yet it seems that there's no one left up there to give you "the kick".
The whack-a-mole meeting:
The invitation suddenly appears in your calendar, out of nowhere. Then it vanishes, leaving you in a state of disbelief, wondering whether you should take a leave or just sleep more. But then it pops up again, at a different time, "updated with note": Lisa had an overlap, let's push it back 30 minutes. It disappears again, but this time you're kind-of-sure you're not delusional, which is a relief in itself. Now it resurfaces as "tentative" because dang, tomorrow is gonna be bank holiday in the London branch. "Let's make it Wednesday maybe?" "Ok, but then Mario could be late because of a previous meeting." "Yeah, no prob: Andrea's gonna join after 40 minutes, we'll have to recap everything for her anyways." And so on and so forth.
Isn’t all this frustrating and infuriating? Doesn't all this look just like amateurism? Can't we seriously do anything better?
Well, we can, and in fact we should. Scrum's got you covered in this department. Each and every Scrum event has its own well defined purpose, its own predetermined schedule, its expected inputs, rules and outcomes, and a predefined list of people who should attend and people who’s not supposed to attend because they would bring no value or, even worse, they would be detrimental for the goal of the meeting.?
Every event is well defined in the Scrum Guide, it happens at regular intervals, and it is shared knowledge across the whole team and stakeholders, so everyone is well aware in advance of:?
It might seem a small thing, but I promise that this approach creates an healthy regular cadence that fosters order and clarity, and has huge effects on the overall effectiveness of the team and on the final results of the project.
As always, thanks for reading and see you in a week or so with the next episode: "Scrum Myth #4: Scrum works only for products"
Co-Founder Wayan srl, Prezzifarmaco.it, Appinfarma.it
2 年Qui sei un po' più talebano, in versione severo ma giusto!