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My friend, colleague and mentor, Tobias Mayer, has new post out today discussing a common complaint I also hear about Scrum – “too many meetings”. I especially liked the way that he confronted the problem by asking the Team members the percentage value received by each of the Scrum meetings. I think it is especially enlightening that both Sprint Planning and the Retrospective are the least valuable for the Team he talked with. I suspect if you asked other Scrum Teams, you would come up with similar results.
As I think about Tobias’s conclusion – there are too many ineffective meetings – I wonder if many people even know what an effective meeting looks like? Most importantly, do ScrumMasters know what effective and collaborative meetings look like? I know that I did not when I was doing ScrumMaster work for the first time and one of the best books I found to help me learn more about the topic of effective meetings was Jean Tabaka’s, Collaboration Explained. In this book, Jean explains there are five steps (six if you include setting-up the room) to have an effective meeting.
I know this is a lot of work to do and it is so much easier to just create a meeting invite in Outlook, pick some attendees and then hit “Send”. But if you do not follow these steps, then you are setting the Team up to have ineffective meetings and diminish their ability to collaborate.