Archive for category: Blog

The Open Meeting Parking Lot

Meetings getting off track? Have you thought about using the idea of an Open Meeting Parking Lot to make an entire meeting more focused?

Many Agile teams complain about meetings that get derailed. This can be anything from a daily Scrum that takes much longer than ideal because everyone has a lot of off-topic items to address, Sprint planning where team members keep getting into the weeds, or really any meeting that gets derailed and ends up far away from the items on the actual agenda for discussion.

One technique that really works is to create an Open Meeting Parking Lot.

Here’s how it works.

At any time during a meeting, when team members see that you are all going off topic or the meeting is in danger of being derailed, any participant can identify a topic to be discussed after the meeting, tagging it as a follow up item, and adding it to the ‘Parking Lot.’ This means it will be discussed ‘outside’ afterwards, rather than right now, during the meeting.

The trick to making this work is to ensure that the Parking Lot is visible for everyone. There are a number of ways to make sure everyone is on the same page and can see the Parking Lot items, such as an easel pad with sticky notes if you’re all there in person, or a shared document that everyone can see onscreen during a conference call.

Using one of these, everyone can see what the Parking Lot items are, everyone understands that they don’t have to be discussed in the meeting, and can join the discussion to address these afterwards.

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Vegas-Style Retrospective by Giora Morein

Vegas-style retrospective might really be the difference-maker in helping your team identify and exploit those improvement opportunities that can propel them through the stratosphere.

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas! This famous tag line might not immediately sound like it has much to do with agile learning or Scrum teams. However, I’ve found that implementing a Vegas-Style approach to your sprint retrospectives can make a real difference to how valuable they are. The idea is simple: What Happens in the Retrospective, Stays in the Retrospective!

The sprint retrospective might be the most important meeting that a Scrum team has. During this time, you and your team explores and analyses opportunities and improvements that the team can take advantage of in the next sprint.

In order for a retrospective to be effective, participants need to be open, transparent, honest and forthcoming.  This requires that participants feel safe to do so.  Much of what a ScrumMaster does during retrospectives is to create an environment that is safe enough to allow for this transparency.

Vegas-Style Retrospectives mean:

• It’s a private meeting.
• It’s a confidential meeting.
• Only members of the scrum team are invited.
• No meeting minutes. No notes. No recordings.
• Activities and learnings are not shared.

This creates a safe environment where team members feel able to truly open up about how they feel, and their ideas for moving forward. This not only helps explores more improvement opportunities but will typically help bond team members closer together.

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Begin and End Your Sprint in the Middle of the Day

My latest Agile QuickTip is all about how ending and starting your sprints in the middle of the day might make your team way more effective.

Most scrum teams will end their sprints at the end of the day, and then start the next one the very next morning. Here is an idea that shakes up this traditional routine, and one which I’ve seen be really effective. Why not begin and end your sprints in the middle of the day?

Here’s how it works in practice.

Your team’s end of sprint activities — the review and retrospective — will take place in the morning, and then you start with sprint planning for the next sprint right after lunch, or early in the afternoon.

I’ve found this to be particularly useful for internationally distributed teams who are spread across the globe, as it allows them to maximise their overlap time where different countries are still all experiencing the working day, something which doesn’t happen if you call a meeting for 9am local time.

By starting and ending in the middle of the day, you can look back on the sprint immediately and start planning for the next one. This emphasis the focus of the day on Improvement. How to improve your processes; how to improve the product; and how to leverage what we’ve learnt to immediately start exploring way to make the next sprint far more effective.

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Publishing your Scrum team’s definition of done

Taking the extra step of publishing your scrum team’s definition of ‘done’ could help your agile team to collaborate and focus on getting things finished.

Every scrum team and every agile team is always looking for ways to deliver as much value as possible in each sprint. This means maximizing what they can finish.

The problem is, that sometimes when one person claims a story is done, it might not mean the same thing as another person calling it done. This creates ambiguity and a lack of transparency, and causes frustration on teams when things seem less ‘complete’ than expected.

Transparency

Creating more transparency can really help here. By publishing an explicit and visible definition of done that exhausts all the things the team has to do to get a story complete, it alleviates that ambiguity.

Now, when one team members says something is ‘done’, it means the same to every other team member. By publishing the definition and making it explicit, even other stakeholders and product owner know what it means for work be complete.

This makes it easier for the whole scrum or agile team to collaborate and align their efforts to get this work done. This also helps keep the team a lot more focused on maximizing the value they can deliver.

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Try an Audio Signal to Start or End your Daily Scrum

Using an audio signal at the beginning or the end of your daily Scrum could help define precisely when it starts and finishes, and make the Scrum a lot more focused.

One thing that a lot of scrum or agile teams complain about is that their daily Scrum takes much longer than they expect. Instead of 10 or 15 minutes, they are finding that it can take 30 or even 40, cutting into their working day and taking them away from other more important things they might have to do.

One problem which I’ve seen many times, is that sometimes the Scrum actually ended a while ago, but nobody noticed because the conversation from the Scrum actually transitioned straight into the follow up. An audio signal can solve this.

Agile QuickTip

By having an actual audible sound that you can trigger to let people know that the Scrum is over, you can keep that Scrum much more focused, and allow team members to leave if the follow up doesn’t concern them.

Play a sound effect from your phone like a chime or a buzzer, or call out something like “Scrum Off” or “Scrum Over!” This will act as a signal to people that the mandatory Scrum is over, and they can leave and get on with whatever else they need to do.

You can use a similar technique to kick off your Scrum, playing a sound, or calling out “Scrum On” or “Scrum Started” to silence any chatter and let team members know that the Scrum has started in a focused way. With this trick, your Scrum can be limited to the 10 or 15 minutes you’ve set aside for it, and should end up being a lot valuable.

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