How to make meetings less painful

The 3 key meeting principles that eased our transition to Scrum

Have you ever looked at your calendar and felt like you were looking at a Tetris board?

Nowadays, meeting overload is a commonly suffered condition.

Why do we tend to dislike meetings?

• If you’re in a meeting, then you’re not doing other work you have on your to do list
• You have to mentally prepare yourself before going into any meeting. What do you want to get out of this meeting? What do you have to be aware of before coming in? For every meeting you attend, you stop thinking about the piece of work you have in front of you. You need brain space for that. This might just take 30 seconds, but it still disrupts your natural workflow.
• The amount of meetings you’ve attended where one person kept on taking up time with nonsense — without reading the room — is too high.
• You need to warm up the scene at the start of every meeting — which is great to develop more of a relationship with a stakeholder, but not great if you just need a quick answer. During any meeting you will spend time talking about topics that are completely unrelated to the meeting’s objective.

Precisely for these reasons, if you are going to adapt a new methodology which requires having more meetings, you will face push back. The Scrum methodology prescribes 4 meetings: sprint planning, daily standup, sprint reviews and sprint retrospective. At Lovecrafts, we have transitioned from Kanban style projects with just a daily standup and regular retrospectives to adapting more of the Scrum methodology. How did we make it work?

Principles to make all meetings work

1. Set an objective for all meetings

• Have a clear objective. Think about what you want and need from the meeting. Don’t gather people together unnecessarily if you’re not trying to accomplish anything. You should never have a meeting just for the sake of having a meeting. Send out an agenda prior to the meeting.
• Make sure everyone involved is aware of what is expected from them during the meeting. Tip: Assigning a role to every attendee will help you resist the urge of inviting too many people.
• For Scrum ceremonies, this is what works for our team in terms of objectives to accomplish:
• Sprint planning: Agree on a goal for the upcoming sprint, review the prioritised backlog, and determine which tickets will be brought into the sprint, based on the team’s capacity. Tip: When we come into sprint planning, we will have already discussed the tickets with the team, understanding dependencies, and effort involved. Anytime a new ticket is created, we groom it. This makes sprint planning sessions more efficient.
• Daily standup: Give an update of what’s going on across the team, flag any blockers, and understand what is going to be released.
• Sprint reviews: Celebrate what the teams have worked on and get immediate feedback. Tip: We hold sprint review sessions with all other product teams, to encourage: knowledge sharing, celebrating, and voicing different opinions. It can be very useful to hear the perspective of someone in product who hasn’t been involved in your project at all, as you can surface potential blind spots
• Sprint retrospectives: Understand what worked well, what didn’t, and determine what can be done to improve things even further.

2. Respect everyone’s time

• Stick to the prescribed time. Be conscious of the time throughout the meeting and suggest setting up follow up meetings if certain topics require more attention than what the meeting would allow for.
• If you think you will just need to meet for 15 minutes instead of 30, send an invitation for a 15 minute meeting.
• If someone doesn’t have to sit through an entire meeting, structure the meeting so that they can leave earlier or join later.
• If you have several meetings with a team, consider whether you can group meetings together. It’s normally more efficient to have a one-hour meeting instead of two blocks of 30 minute meetings. This saves the time required to settle in to a meeting (ice breakers, moving from your desk to the meeting room, etc.). In my team’s case, we frequently hold retrospectives and planning sessions back-to-back. We find this works for us as we: (1) lose less time and (2) enter the new sprint taking into account the good, the bad, and the ugly of the previous sprint.

3. Keep things human

• Make things awkward and have fun in the process. A sprint retro in which everyone says that the past weeks have been completely smooth sailing might be a reflection of the fact that people are afraid to speak up.
• Encourage surfacing vulnerabilities.
• Talk about feelings.

It’s worth noting that although all of these principles and elements are important, they should not be conducted in a vacuum. If you just add Scrum ceremonies to a waterfall project, your team will not automatically be agile. You should take into account your team’s preferred ways of working, their strengths, their weaknesses and adapt any processes to meet your team’s needs. If a recipe doesn’t work for you because it has nuts and a team member is severely allergic to them, adapt the recipe!