Your Scrum Meetings Are Too Long (and How to Shorten Them)
“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything”
— John Kenneth Galbraith
We already had too many meetings before COVID. It’s only gotten worse.
Many of you have been on the receiving end of this. It’s incredibly frustrating. At best, your time is wasted. You stop paying attention and place the meeting to the background while you do other work. At worst, you get so completely derailed that it affects your ability to work for the rest of the day.
This is an issue that Paul Graham (of Y Combinator fame) addresses in an article written in 2009. Yes, that’s 11 years ago. Long before we were all cooped up at home due to fears of an ongoing pandemic, we had already been attending way too many meetings.
Paul’s theory revolves around the fact that we have two types of people: makers and managers. In terms of Scrum, makers are equivalent to developers. Managers need a lot more meetings to get things done. Makers, on the other hand, are very easily distracted from their primary function because of meetings.
As a Scrum Master, this puts me in quite a dilemma. The Scrum Guide requires four different types of meetings called “events.” At the end of the day, each of these Scrum Events are required within the framework of Scrum. Now while it’s possible to cut some of these meetings, the Scrum Guide explicitly says that “while implementing only parts of Scrum is possible, the result is not Scrum.” Since the primary topic of this article is about Scrum, I won’t be deviating from that.
So what CAN we do then? Well the answers are pretty obvious. The first thing is something you should already be doing: cutting meetings outside of Scrum. “Prescribed events are used in Scrum to create regularity and to minimize the need for meetings not defined in Scrum.” — Scrum Guide 2020
The second thing we can do is to short the Scrum meetings, which I will go over in detail in this article.
Some of you reading this you might be thinking “well I couldn’t possibly make this meeting any shorter.” Well, allow me to share the story of a small startup called Southwest Airlines.
Okay, true, they’re not a startup anymore, but every company was a startup at some point in time. In 1974, Southwest Airlines was hemorrhaging money, and very quickly, so they turned to a man named Bill Franklin to solve their issue.
Now Southwest was, and still is, a budget airline. Being a price fighter, the cost of plane tickets will only put them in the crosshairs of the other major airlines, so that idea was dismissed pretty quickly.
Southwest is also very well known for how it treats its employees, with a unique culture that encourages hugging during board meetings, and requires all pictures in their offices to be photos of friends and family. While I’m sure cutting employee costs was a consideration, there were still other considerations to look at.
The often touted axiom of the time was that “airplanes made money while in the air.” But what about the time that the plane is left on the ground?
Bill Franklin came up with the idea turning planes around in 10 minutes, at a time when an hour turnaround was the standard. Of course, there were objections, which were quickly met with threats of getting fired — so much for valuing your employees. But it worked like a charm, nobody was fired, and Southwest finally turned profit.
I firmly believe that if Southwest can turn a plane around in 10 minutes, with careful planning, you too should also be able to cut down your meeting times.
Shorter Meetings
In order to facilitate shorter meetings, the most important things to keep in mind are focusing on topic, and sticking to the agenda. There are a variety of tools that a Scrum Master use to keep these intact.
Setting the Stage
Have you ever walked into the wrong classroom? How long did it take you to realize you were in the wrong class? Hopefully not too long, if the first thing the professor writes on the board is Ethics 101 when you were expecting a class on Politics (I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere).
The same philosophy should apply to the workplace. If you set the stage at the very beginning of every meeting, anyone who does not need to be in the meeting can leave, and you save the company time and money!
Setting the stage is the simple practice of describing what will be talked about in the meeting. You can do it verbally, or visually. If over your screen you have written “Sprint Review for Green Circle,” the stakeholders for Blue Square know that they’re in the wrong place.
Once you set the stage, you help create a context where everyone in the meeting knows what to talk about, and rather than allow for a natural flowing of topics, it becomes clear the most important topics to discussed and what can be pushed to another meeting.
Parking Lot
Have you ever had this great idea, but held it in because you didn’t want to interrupt the person talking? And now all the sudden it’s your turn to speak, but you forgot what you wanted to say.
Enter the parking lot.
The parking lot is simply a place for team members to “park” ideas that are considered off-topic, so they may be addressed at a later time. If you set the stage earlier, it becomes easier to determine whether something is considered on-topic or off-topic. Now you can go tell Bill Lumbergh (in the most polite way possible) to use the parking lot next time he tries to take over your meeting.
Timeboxing Topics
The Scrum Guide already mentions the word “Timebox” several times, although in the context of how long the Scrum events should be themselves. In this case, I’m specifically specifically about keeping certain topics to a specific amount of time. In other words, creating an agenda for each meeting, and sticking to it.
Seems simple enough right?
Well the problem is that when you’re the only one keeping track of the time, it becomes solely your responsibility. I find it incredibly stressful to rush a topic when not every participant has bought into the idea that we have to keep to the schedule. I have found much better results by simply putting a countdown timer on my computer and sharing that in the screen.
Concluding Remarks
With careful planning, it’s easy to see that a team can save time without sacrificing the structure of the Scrum Framework. It’s not about rushing through discussions as quickly as possible. It’s about focusing on the tasks that need to be accomplished, and allowing deeper discussions that don’t help us complete tasks to take secondary priority. In the end, everyone will be happier for every hour that you return to them.
What are some things that you do to help shorten your meetings?
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