Do You sometimes struggle to recognize which meetings are serving which purposes?
Here we have prepared a short summary of all kinds of meetings with descriptions & their typical agendas to help you bring more value out of them in the future.
First let's separate Scrum Events from other meetings and focus on each of those groups separately to maintain clarity.
Scrum Events
Scrum Events are essentially an optimal amount of teamwork oriented meetings that have to be held at a constant pace to deliver high quality software. Every set of scrum event’s is directly connected to certain product development.
You can read more about Scrum framework (and other Agile approaches to software development) here:
https://sailingbyte.com/blog/how-to-agile-full
External meetings (not only for developers) - presence of client’s representative(s) is crucial to bring value out of those meetings
___Sprint___
Sprint is described indetail in this article
https://sailingbyte.com/blog/hints-from-scrum-master-what-does-it-mean-to-work-in-sprints
____Sprint Review & Planning___
Those two meetings are described in details in this article:
https://sailingbyte.com/blog/hints-from-scrum-master-sprint-planning
Internal meetings (for developers) - presence of client’s representative(s) is possible but does not bring value all the time.
____Daily Scrum____
Daily Scrum is a short max 15 min meeting that serves to developers as an opportunity to reassure where “they are” in the context of obtaining a Sprint Goal. During Daily developers share one with each other information about possible problems/blockers in certain tasks.They are also referring to Sprint Backlog and decide if any adjustments/tradeoffs have to be made in order to obtain Sprint Goal.
This meeting should not be longer than 15 min. This implies that it should be more decision making oriented than strictly technical.
____Sprint Retrospective____
Sprint Retrospective is a typically max 60 min meeting that serves to developers and Scrum Master (and Product Owners if they were asked to join) as an opportunity to look back on the whole product development process that was done in the last sprint That time is very precious because it helps whole team to find weakest spots and then process with series of root cause analysis in order to decide where to react to bring most value.
This meeting demands from everyone present during it to be open for professional critique and respect opinions of others. This meeting is also an amazing opportunity for Scrum Master to educate everyone involved in the Scrum process (that means clients too!) for example by writing Hints From Scrum Master on our company blog.
Other Meetings
Those meetings are not connected directly to any Agile framework/tool (Scrum or other) but if they are bringing value they can be added/appointed at any time in any given project
____Business meeting____
Business meetings serve as an opportunity to discuss ideas and share feedback connected with areas other than software development as such. (adjustments in processes of data & knowledge transition between companies, incoming changes in pricing, introducing changes of pricing model , gathering feedback about long term product development plans, planning certain product releases with marketing departments etc. )
Example of such meeting:
Bi weekly “organizational” meeting between Client representation (Manager/CEO/marketing manager etc.) & Sailing Byte representation (CEO/Proj. Manager).
Good practices in organizing buissness meetings:
- timeboxing them to maximum 60 mins (if there is a need for a longer meeting than it should be clearly stated upfront. By default it's always better to plan regular, shorter than irregular longer meetings);
- preparing at least a brief agenda to narrow the scope of topics that will be discussed;
- sharing upfront any data that will be a basis for discussion ;
- summarizing most important topics in writing to check if both sides understood what they have said/agreed;
- planning the next meeting at the very end of the current one.
____Scrum Master & Product Owner Consultation____
We are proposing consulting services that will help you to re-organize certain product development processes, outsource high quality research and ultimately make you a better decision maker.
You can find detailed offer here:
https://sailingbyte.com/services/web-development/project-consulting
