Meeting time in Scrum, by the book, is fairly linear.  A one week sprint and four-week sprint have roughly the same percentage of time spent in ceremonies/meetings. Nearly every Scrum Master I communicated with on this topic – a mixture of people with and without technical backgrounds – has techniques to minimize the frustrations that teams voice about meeting times. This is a topic you will not be able to avoid; explaining to frustrated coders and testers the value of any specific meeting more than once will only irritate them more. Explaining that it really does not matter because more is getting done rarely changes minds in mass. Finally, making the ceremonies more fun (for example, providing food or sweets) only works for a while and then becomes an expectation (I am very fond of donuts or pizza). There are several good ways to address the perception of too much meeting time. 

When I asked coaches and Scrum Masters (all practitioners) how they approach this problem, almost to a person they started by listening to the team and then asking them for solutions. In order to understand the depth of the problem, it is imperative that you observe how the team is functioning to facilitate the conversations. After going to the Gemba, retrospective techniques are very useful for exploring the problem and identifying experiments to address those problems. In these circumstances, make sure the team understands the goal of the meeting and then ask them to test their solutions on two factors: first their perspective on the value for the time spent, and, secondly, whether the meeting still satisfies the goal. Experiments should continue until both factors are true. 

Isaac Garcia, Agile Coach and Scrum Master at AIG, suggested: “Spend the time thinking before a meeting and save time in the meeting.” Isaac’s observation is a reflection of meetings and ceremonies being overused as group exploration sessions. Doing your homework and pre-reading before any meeting makes them more productive and potentially shorter. Jeff Bezos of  Amazon ensures that the pre-reading is done by making the first part of every meeting, reading time. Make sure everyone in the meeting/ceremony is starting from the same state of knowledge or you will spend time getting to that point during the meeting.

Charlene Wooley, CSM, CSPO and QA Analyst at Brandt Information Services, pointed out that controlling who gets invited to a meeting reduces the number of attendees (and the amount of time used by the meeting).  She went on further to note, “sometimes everyone needs to attend – if that is the case – create an agenda, share it before the meeting and stick to it.” I have a friend that is the master of the meeting filibuster, they can launch a meeting off in a different direction with ease to avoid items they would rather not talk about. Agendas are a great tool but so is active facilitation.

Brendan Sandham, Scrum Master and RTE at Hyland Software, makes the point that respecting the time box is a form of respecting the people in the meeting. One of the aspects of Scrum is the use of the time box — nearly everything has a specific timebox.  While Steve Tendon and Daniel Doiron argue that there is a dark side to timeboxes, if you book a 30-minute meeting it does not mean you prattle on for 45 minutes.  

Christopher Hurney, Coach, Scrum Master, and Product Owner at  Inspirado Consulting LLC, provided an example of a team status meeting in which the whole team attended and were treated to watching some type of the statuses each person shared into an ALM too.  Chris’s go-to technique for reducing meeting overhead is quite simple – let’s retrospect and compare/contrast the meeting and its outputs against the idea that some value should have been achieved (value in the Lean sense): – did the team achieve something, in that meeting, that directly advanced their value-seeking goals (i.e. sprint goal)?” I try to save the last 5 minutes (ish) of every meeting to perform a quick retrospective so that the next meeting will be better. 

There are many other approaches to reducing consternation over meetings. Three Amigos (also known as Three Diverse Humans) is a way to reduce the number of people that need to be involved with user story refinement. Cross-training is another approach to ensure that everyone does not need to be in every meeting. One final idea for solving the meeting time conundrum is not to let agile ceremonies become social events. Each has a specific purpose, everyone needs to understand the goal. Agendas, mentioned earlier, are a tool to highlight the goal.

The bottom line, everyone that has been trained in agile, Scrum, Lean, Toyota Production System (TPS) or any of the other multitude of process improvement approaches should understand that if the process is broken, and overall frustration means it is broken, they need to facilitate finding a solution.