Scrum does not have too many meetings.

Each reform in society is confronted with a backlash.  The Protestant Reformation spawned the Inquisition.  Naturally, those threatened by it would oppose progress.  This is happening in businesses across the nation due to 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.

During 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 facilitate 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 the number of hours the Agile team spends in meetings. Here's how it breaks down for a three-week sprint.

• 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-hour sprint.

Thus, developers spend just over ten percent of their time in meetings in a worst-case scenario. The remainder is devoted to writing software and creating value for customers. This is significantly less than waterfall project management, with numerous meetings covering everything from architecture to problem-solving.

The scrum master and product owner attend meetings to protect the team from being distracted from delivering value. I attend meetings about I.T. governance or architecture so my team does not have to. This is why the product owner answers customer inquiries and meets with management. We attend the meetings so the development team can concentrate on what is essential, which is the shipping code.

This 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 their routine nature and the expectation of shipping the 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 do not spend too much time in meetings; they concentrate on what is essential. An agile team’s first and foremost duty is to deliver value to the business; anything else is wasted. I am looking forward to hearing from you and hearing what you have to say.

Until next time.