Effective Scrum Meeting

What is the purpose of a meeting? The simple answer is making a decision, to come to a point. In Scrum, meeting is the part of life. You have daily scrum meeting, 1 on 1 meeting, retrospective, sprint planning meeting, user story presentation meeting, demo presentation meeting and unlisted many more when necessary. Doing effective meeting is very important for doing right things. PO has a vision that describe as a requirement in some PBL or user story. S/he describes his vision in a meeting so that it convey to the team. Daily scrum synchronize everybody's work and let the team know the status of individuals. Therefore, the meeting should be effective for an efficient and better job get done.

    Synchronization: Synchronization is very important for daily scrum. Right after the scrum, team lead should synchronize everybody's work. S/he also should find out the dependency among team members. Team lead should find out the issues and should take proper actions. This can be also scrum masters job but not always scrum master can find out issues, scrum master will dig into the impediments.

    Agenda: Besides daily scrum, there should be an agenda of all kind of meeting. The respective person who is calling the meeting should fix the agenda prior to the meeting.

    Tracking: There needs to keep a track that the meeting is going on the right direction. Sometimes in a meeting some different topics come in and a long discussion spent on that topic. The meeting manager (the person who called for the meeting) will notify everybody if meeting goes on the wrong direction.

    Summarize: In every end of a meeting there should be a summary which will be agreed among all parties who is attending on the meeting. The minute writer will responsible to write down the summary with the "Action Plan".

    Time: Time is less important factor for meeting. But I believe the morning meeting is more effective than afternoon meeting. In morning the mind stays fresh and cool, on the other hand at afternoon people get exhausted and they may not keep proper concentration.

    Length: The length of meeting can be an important. Typically, people can't keep concentrate for a long time. Very long time meeting can be very inefficient.

Implement “PIN” to meet your project deadline

I don't have a vast experience on project management, although I have spent almost 4 years in different scrum environment. I told in such way because there is no such role as "Project manager" in scrum. I can rather say project manager and PO is the same person. Our company implements this in some other way. Here, there have both PO and PM. The PM acts as a Team Lead. I've a very tiny experience as a Team Lead (Project manager) into our organization. So I need to run a team and meet projects deadline. From my tiny thoughts I can say that implementing PIN can avoid missing deadline. PIN stands for PLANNING, IDENTIFYING, NOTIFYING.

    Planning: Plan is the most important factor of meeting deadline. You need to plan for development, plan for testing, plan for code review/code refactor and plan to handle the risks. Without proper planning the entire project may fails. So, how do I plan better? First time the answer is so easy….. plan with your team members. Better planning will come from experience. You will learn from 1 on 1. You will learn from retrospective. You can do better planning by being pro-active.

    Identifying: You need to identify different factors and may create a matrix of timeline of the deadline. You can identify by seeing burndown chart. What needs to identify? Identify the impediments, identify the risk if it is turning to the crisis. You need to be intelligent enough to identify all these factors.

    Notifying: Notify to the team members, notify to scrum master or notify to the upper management if you see any problem happened. Raise the flag if you see the risk is becoming crisis.

    There may have some other factor involved to meeting deadline. There is no math/logic to solve any deadline equation.