Some practical tips to reclaim time from meetings

When first working with a new company or group, I often hear “we have no time because there are too many meetings.” Initially the agile ceremonies can be targeted as a cause of wasted time. This might be for a variety of reasons; they occur often, they are new in addition to existing, usually wasteful, meetings and/or because the team don’t know how to get value out of them and are just doing them by rote. Arguably a team that has too many meetings don’t get the value out of most of them anyway. Badly run meetings can be a huge time sink but there can still be too many well run meetings. Time is necessary for innovation, improvement and engagement.

Note that the agile ceremonies have several characteristics in common that save time. They have clear agendas with a limited number of objectives per ceremony, timebox (fixed time) and limited attendees (fixed capacity) and highest priority topics are discussed only as time allows (variable scope with economic prioritisation) They occur on a cadence, so can be planned a long time in advance providing certainty and reducing interrupts. Many of the ceremonies are short because they happen regularly which applies two principles; firstly, smaller timeboxes result in smaller discussions (smaller batch sizes) which are more likely to reach a conclusion quicker and secondly, each iteration of the ceremony the team comes together and learns something (the team is frequently integrating knowledge and learning in increments). The design of the agile ceremonies is based around the entire system and not just to solve one problem (systems thinking) The preparation for most of the agile ceremonies (apart from PI planning) is greatly reduced because the inputs are a by-product of agile work and are supported by high levels of automation.

When we consider various ways in which time can be managed more effectively, it becomes clear that the agile ceremonies are an effective use of time if done correctly. These principles can be applied to all meetings:

1. Trim the number of objectives for each meeting (limiting WIP and respecting capacity)

• Meetings should have a clear agenda with a small number of objectives
• Before defining the agenda, consider all other meetings in the schedule to avoid waste (systems thinking)
• Stick to the agenda – when the objectives are met, the meeting is over even if the time is not
• Don’t accept meetings with no agenda because the objectives are unknown so can’t be managed. If unstructured time is needed, schedule it intentionally rather than a meeting without purpose.

2.      Don’t waste time on decision making

• Everyone should understand how decisions are made in meetings, so time is not wasted figuring out how to make the decision or how to game it by “playing politics”
• Have information to hand to support decision making but note that preparation for meetings should be the result of doing the work, not additional effort. Don’t spend two hours preparing for a one-hour meeting.
• Have the people needed for approvals in the meeting or be empowered to make decisions without approvals from outside the meeting

3.      Reduce meetings that don’t count towards your top objectives (economic prioritisation)

• Meetings that have nothing to do with furthering the top strategic objectives and goals should account for less than 30% of available time

4.      Control what you focus on

• Finish an agenda item before starting a new one. Finished work adds value and results in learning. Coming out of a meeting with all the topics half-discussed adds no value
• Plan your time to keep uninterrupted work blocks and collaboration time (meetings, swarming/mobbing etc) separate by leveraging cadence and adjusting it to create blocks of uninterrupted time. Since the cadence is set in advance, expectations can be set for the next year.
• List all the work needed to be prepared for a meeting and eliminate what isn’t adding value. Consider reports and metrics as typical examples of things that should be automated or a by-product of the work rather than prepared specifically. Get rid of vanity reports and vanity metrics without regret.
• Plan to neglect topics and objectives from a meeting by being clear in advance. Topics that are more effectively discussed in future meetings with the different attendees, focus and agenda are not productive topics for the current meeting. Topics may also come up unexpectedly in meetings but prevent them from becoming a distraction.

5.      Address problems before they become a crisis

• Don’t wait for the next meeting to raise something which may become worse in the interim but don’t interrupt everyone if it can wait until the next scheduled meeting. The benefits of having a regular cadence is that you don’t have to wait too long.
• Have a team working agreement for how to address items that are difficult to talk about but cannot be resolved without discussion – a secret cannot be fixed

6.      Retrospect meetings and improve meeting culture

• Collaboratively discuss meeting outcomes and work out how to improve them
• If the team find there is limited value in a meeting, eliminate it and/or combine the useful parts into another meeting. This can be on a trial basis.
• Don’t let meetings get hijacked by others with different agendas. Respect the purpose of the meeting and the attendees – this applies to senior managers too.

In summary, managing time effectively helps the team be more flexible. Time flexibility increases productivity and employee engagement. This is everyone’s responsibility and it takes commitment. Remember that if you waste someone’s money you can always repay it but if you waste their time you can never return that.