Death by Scrum Meeting
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There is no better way to gauge an organization’s culture than to watch its meetings - usually dull and lifeless. Meetings are often cited as one of the most wasteful activities in business - yet Scrum demands more meetings more often. Engineers find themselves micro-managed with little time left to get “real” work done. This session provides leaders a whole new perspective and techniques for Scrum Meetings in building high-performing disciplined teams through focused, active, engaged, visual and time-boxed facilitation techniques to take teams from DOING Scrum to OWNING Scrum!
Meetings provide the best opportunity to move teams from DOING Scrum to OWNING Scrum. The difference is huge! Teams that OWN the process and their commitment are more engaged, committed, and accountable to their results. Teams that OWN their work have more fun, are more productive and produce higher-quality software. This session teaches techniques to move teams from DOING to OWNING - teams who share responsibility in meeting organizational objectives.
This is an interactive tutorial with team-based activities to apply their new learning. We explore the concepts of 1) Focus - to structure the discussion in a strategic, tactical or daily context; 2) Action-oriented - to get people engaged in the discussion and results of the meeting; and 3) Visual - to structure and focus the discussion throughout the meeting; and 4) Time-boxed - to provide the structure for a focused meeting with a quality result.
As a Scrum coach working with many, many organizations and teams, wasteful and ineffective meetings is one of the most common pitfalls that I see teams fall into after attending a training workshop. While the concepts of backlogs and sprints are easy, creating and estimating their sizes are quite painful and often lead to Scrum rot. Coaching effective and efficient meetings is something that I do with every organization and team I work with - often with very praising feedback.
This session borrows ideas and concepts from Patrick Lencioni’s “Death by Meeting” in that it takes the concept of context-focused meetings (strategic, tactical, and daily). However, it extends the model specifically for Scrum in applying action-oriented and visual elements to fully engage teams in the decision process creating more committed and productive teams.
- Learn that effective and efficient meetings are focused strategically, tactically or daily - not all mixed up
- Learn that effective and efficient meetings are action-oriented - they get everyone involved “hands on”
- Learn that effective and efficient meetings require visual and spacial representation - not just discussion
- Learn how to cut the time of meetings by 4x and yet increase the quality of the output.
- Learn the concept of time-boxing and how it can be applied to any meeting or decision
- Learn how to apply these techniques to release planning, sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives.
- Learn to fully engage the team in the decision process increasing team commitment, ownership and understanding of the goals
