Scrum does not have too many meetings

Each reform in society is confronted with a backlash.  The Protestant Reformation spawned the Inquisition.  It is natural that those threatened by it would oppose progress.  It is happening in businesses across the nation with the Agile reformation.  A common objection many have toward agile or scrum is there are too many meetings.  This week I want to discuss agile and meetings.

According to the scrum guide there are four events in scrum, they are:

• Sprint planning
• Daily Scrum or Stand-Up
• Sprint review 
• Sprint retrospective.

In the span of a work week, these meetings should be brief and informative.  A stand-up meeting should take approximately fifteen to thirty minutes.  If it takes longer, you should review how you are facilitating this meeting.  A sprint review is a demonstration to the business users and should take no longer than an hour.  Retrospectives allow a team to inspect and adapt their process.  Typically, this meeting is about sixty to ninety minutes in length.  Finally, there is sprint planning where the development team estimates stories and plans the next race.  Sprint planning can take as little as an hour and as much as six.

Based on this rough estimate we can determine how many hours the agile team is spending in meetings.  Based on a three-week sprint where is how it break down.

• Typical work week 40 x 3 = 120 hrs.
• Standup meeting – 0:15 x 15 = 3:45 hrs.
• Sprint Planning – 6 x 1 = 6 hrs.
• Sprint Review – 1 x 1 = 1 hrs.
• Retrospective – 1 x 1:30 = 1:30 hrs.
• Total Time budgeted in meetings = 12:15 hours of a 120 hrs. sprint.

Thus, a developer at worse case scenario spends just over ten percent of their time in meetings.  The remainder of the time is devoted to writing software and creating value for customers.  It is significantly less than in the world of waterfall project management with its numerous meetings to cover everything from architecture to problem-solving.

The scrum master and product owner spend their time in meetings, but it is to protect the team from being distracted from delivering value.  It is why I attend meetings about I.T. governance or architecture so that my team does not have to.  It is why the product owner is answering customer inquiries and meeting management.  We attend the meetings so the development team can concentrate on what is important which is shipping code.

It is why I find the argument that agile has too many meetings disingenuous.  People who are opposed to agile are not opposed to the meetings they are opposed to the routine nature of the meetings and the expectation to ship working code at the end of each sprint.  Transparency of this nature quickly exposes the unwilling, incompetent, or invisible people in an organization who do not deliver value.  When we discover these individuals, it creates a backlash in the organization.

So, scrum and agile does not spend too much time in meetings; it concentrated on what is essential.  An agile team’s first and foremost duty is to deliver value to the business; anything else is waste.  I am looking forward to hearing from you and knowing what you have to say.

Until next time.