Scrum Without Endless Meetings: A Streamlined Approach

You do some version of Scrum. Your team dreads the end of each sprint and the day of unending meetings. This is relatively easy to avoid if you follow a rolling wave planning process.

Rolling planning (Tue-Thu 30 min.)

Each day after stand up, as needed, the designers and developers give 30 minutes to product people. In this time they co-author, clarify, scope and estimate stories. By Thursday, the product people have stories ready to play, force ranked by value for the next week.

Does the team need to estimate stories? Depends on whether estimation clarifies scope, surfaces risks, raises alternatives. It can help the team make and live up to commitments.

Commitment setting (Mon 30 min.)

On Monday morning, the product team shows the backlog they’ve collectively been working on the prior week. They propose a cutoff of how many stories they think the team can get done based on the work completed the week before (yesterday’s weather). 

The team shifts that cutoff line up or down based on their confidence and makes a commitment. It’s faster to start at a cutoff based on data and adjust rather than build the commitment story by story.

Is a commitment necessary? It empowers product people to make commitments to sponsors with assurance the rest of the team has their back. It helps empower a team to pull stories in a way that best assures meeting the commitment rather than sticking to the force rank.

Retrospective (Weekly 60 min.)

At the end of each week, hold a 30-60 minute retrospective as one team with the product people, designers, and developers. 

Retrospection is often the practice that needs most improvement. A good retrospective process is data informed and goes deep into why problems exist before proposing solutions. It limits the changes it introduces and holds people accountable for making them. Finally it measures whether changes have the desired effect and stops doing things that don’t work.

Showcase (Tue or Wed 30 min. / Subset of team)

Hold a 30 minute showcase for stakeholders. The product people facilitate as a rotating subset of developers and design present the completed work from the prior week. Done well, this will foster a human connection between co-workers across workgroups as well as make the output of the team more visible.

Roadmap Planning (Tue or Wed 60 min. / Subset of team)

Following the showcase, the product people hold a 60 minute conversation with stakeholders to align expectations for a 1-3 mo. timeframe. Developers are free to duck out of that at their discretion. The fact that it is an hour and happens every week, enables the product team to focus the conversation on an agenda and tackle issues incrementally.

Conclusion

So, this is a weekly planning rhythm. It favors shorter sessions on a daily basis over longer meetings once a week. Meetings are predictably scheduled, have clear attendees, and intended outcomes. No individual meeting is more than an hour.

#agile #scrum #sprintplanning