Power Scrum: Secrets to a Good Meeting
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Date
This is a guest post from Bill Krebs, owner of Agile Dimensions LLCThe agile methodology of "scrum" is known for its 15-minute daily meetings. Its format contains three questions. Participants state what they did yesterday, what they will to today and what road blocker stands in their way.
The meetings can be deceptively powerful--if used correctly. But oftentimes they drag on for half an hour or more.
So what goes wrong? And how can you get back the benefits? Here are some ideas.
FocusThere are two kinds of work covered in a scrum meeting: Specific tasks from your project plans (or iteration backlog), and general interrupts and overhead (such as e-mail and meetings). Do team members ramble on about work that has nothing to do with their iteration backlog? Do they say a lot just to impress other teammates?
Focus the talk on things that relate only to the tasks identified for that particular two-week block of work (an iteration). And then encourage people to focus on and finish two tasks per day. This will discourage the inefficiencies of multitasking. Team members are not limited to calling out roadblocks. They should mention any that appear.
Have you ever heard someone who is "80 percent done" with a task every day? Each new day shows only partial progress, but never completion. Focusing on what was actually finished yesterday, and what will be finished today, helps cure this problem.
The scrum meeting is not about status. It's about completion.
Control the Number of ParticipantsLet the core testers and developers on the team do the talking. Other people may have an interest in the meeting, but they should just listen.
If your meeting gets bigger than nine people, hold two separate meetings and then have a "scrum of scrums" every few days where representatives from each group get together.
Go OfflineOur inner geek often wants to deep dive into architecture on the fly. (Who can resist?)
In those moments, however, the scrum master (who facilitates the meeting) should say, "That's a great topic, let's set up a time for the two of you to discuss after the meeting."
Don't leave everyone hanging while two people talk. And if you go a week without hearing your scrum master say, "take it offline," there may be room for improvement.
Remember My Three A's:Awareness: The meeting is about knowing what your teammates are up to.
Ad: The meeting is an advertisement for collaboration. Micro teams of two to three people form, which makes for great collaboration later in the day.
Attack: Attack the blockers. The team can rally to address a problem--either within one minute in the scrum meeting, or more often, after the meeting. Problems that require detailed work by a subset of the team can be arranged for after the meeting. That way, people who are not involved don't have to sit through the discussion.
Those tips will cut the fluff--and speed up your work!
Posted
by
William Krebs
on: February 25, 2010 03:46 PM |
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Comments (2)
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Hi William,
Thanks for this nice article. We figured out that standup meetings are great but needed improvement (they took a lot of time, de-focussed our colleagues and interrupted their workflows). Because of this we developed a SaaS tool to "automate" the daily standup meetings - with just a single email. If you like to take a look: www.30secondsmail.com.
Best,
Ajie
Good article, thanks for sharing!
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