Who doesn’t want to be part of a Scrum Team? 🤩
Quite often, however, after the Scrum honeymoon, people start raising issues: "All I do is attend meetings."
This drives some Scrum Teams to abandon Scrum altogether.🤷
Factually, how time-consuming are the Scrum events?⌚
The time boxes are:
- Daily Scrum: 15 minutes;
- Sprint Planning: at most 8 hours;
- Sprint Review: at most 4 hours;
- Sprint Retrospective: at most 3 hours;
For a full-time developer in a 4-week Sprint, the Scrum events take at most 22,5% of the time:36 of the 160 Sprint hours.
Should we spend (this much) time on these events?🤔
Software development requires collaboration between the people that are doing the work. 🗣️
Spending time on the Scrum events is incredibly valuable as it helps us plan the work, and align our work with the problem that we’re trying to solve.👍
A] The origins of this myth
1. The meeting culture was already there
“The Scrum events should be used to minimize the need for meetings not defined in Scrum.”
But Scrum Teams often have to attend meetings outside of the regular Scrum events.
This makes our tidy Sprint schedule a bit more convoluted. 🙅♂️
2. Poor facilitation of the Scrum events
The Sprint Review is a lengthy presentation of new features, without opportunities for interaction.
The Daily Scrum devolves into in-depth discussions, running up to 30 minutes or more.
Without proper preparation and facilitation, the Scrum events will be (and feel like) a waste of time. 🚮
3. Part-time team members or people that are part of multiple teams 🤯
If a person has to join every Scrum event of multiple teams, it will certainly feel like a 5-headed meeting monster.
Scrum simply surfacing existing organizational dysfunctions.
4. ‘Only sitting behind my laptop is work’ 👨💻
For developers, this is akin to saying that ‘only coding is work’.
Spending time with the entire team in a room will be more effective in the outcomes that it generates.
B] Tips 👍
1. Don’t have meetings. Have workshops that promote conversations
2. Fit meetings into the schedule of the Development Team
3. Try Liberating Structures: https://www.liberatingstructures.com
4. Respect time-boxes
5. Prepare the Scrum events
6. Get the most out of the Scrum events
#scrum #meetings #worth
Src. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/myth-11-scrum-we-spend-too-much-time-meetings