Step Five involves reclaiming the time that has been taken away from agile teams in the form of meetings. One of the largest collective complaints I hear from teams who attempt to embrace Agile processes is the overhead in holding all of the typical ceremonial meetings in conjunction with all of the newly introduced agile meetings thereby creating massive overhead. What steps can we take to solve this issue and help people feel like they have the information they need while optimizing?
The key to reclaiming the time many teams feel like they are throwing away is to help teams schedule and hold more effective meeting across the board. The three keys to consider when discussing agile meetings in the workplace are inputs, outputs, and meeting attendees. Inputs are absolutely critical to the success of the meeting. We often look past the simple things that are most critical to the success of the organization. Key factors include having a unified vision across the team that as well as a strategy for precision execution.
The vision and strategy lead to excellence in roadmap planning, a well defined roadmap can drive great execution of the release plan. Great release planning feeds directly into effective sprint and iteration level planning. Each day, we are faced with executing to deliver products and or projects that fill the end needs of the consumer. Setting realistic expectations within the organization about what to expect as an end result of the meeting is critical to the meetings success.
The true key to this step is to hold more frequent meetings, with fewer attendees, and a tangible outcome. This will help teams and leadership stay focused on delivering the outcome that provides the greatest value to the end consumer. Keep meetings short and only invite who needs to be present. This leads to meeting success!