Start interacting with your team members to discuss your daily activities, new ideas, bottlenecks, and upcoming goals. In traditional project management, a team might meet every week or two to talk about the project's progress. In agile methodology, teams follow predefined meeting types to successfully accomplish sprints. In Zoho Sprints, you'll see default meeting types that will empower your team to be truly agile.
How meetings are productive in Scrum?
Traditional project management follow a generic format for meetings whereas agile follows five specific types of meetings. Scrum is an iterative process in which purpose-driven meetings help the team analyze each stage of the sprint cycle before moving on to the next stage. The meetings improve team collaboration and help ensure a quality outcome at the end of every sprint.
Different types of meetings
There are five different types of meeting in Zoho Sprints, which you can schedule with your team members at regular intervals. You get to meet with your team often: before the sprint starts, in the middle of the sprint, and after the sprint ends.
Sprint Planning
Sprint planning is the foundation for your team's success. This meeting is scheduled before the sprint starts.
Purpose
After you create a sprint, the entire team attends this meeting to discuss the work items that can be moved from the backlog. The Team Owner/Admin and managers will have a prioritized list of work items in the backlog. The sprint team estimates the effort of each work item and forecasts how much they can accomplish in that particular sprint. Based on the sprint team's capacity, work items are pushed from the backlog to the sprint.
Your sprint planning meeting is the base for your team's success, so make sure you get it right with proper estimation. Based on the duration of your sprint, you can forecast and commit to the amount of work that your sprint team can deliver.
Remember to pick the highest priority work item from the list first.
Never overcommit, because it increases the chances that you will fail to deliver the work.
Participants
Duration
This is the primary meeting where the entire team will decide on the workable items for the next two to four weeks. So the duration should be a minimum of one hour for a one-week sprint. If the sprint is for two weeks, then two hours of meeting is recommended. It's not mandatory to conduct a two-hour planning meeting for a two-weeks sprint. The team can spend one hour on the first week to discuss the estimates, and the remaining hour on the second week.
Daily Stand-ups
Your stand-ups help determine your progress during the sprints. These meetings are conducted every day to track the work of individual members.
Participants
Duration
A stand-up is a 15-minute meeting and should not extend more than the scheduled time.
Purpose
After the sprint starts, the team conducts a daily stand-up meeting to discuss the progress of each member on that particular day. Stand-ups help everyone quickly understand what's going on in the team. Every member of the sprint will answer these questions:
What are all the work items that I completed yesterday?
What are all the work items that I'll work on today?
What are the issues that block my progress?
- Stand-ups should be casual and honest. You need to be an open book with your sprint team and your sprint owner.
This is a great way to identify and clear bottlenecks.
- Don't extend your stand-ups by even 15 minutes. All you need to do is just discuss the progress of your work to the sprint owner.
- Remember you're not making a full report on the status of your work. You don't need to prepare for your daily stand-ups. Just talk about the work that you've completed and the work that you plan to do for the day.
Sprint Review
Reviews are a more formal part of your sprint. These meetings are scheduled after the sprint is completed.
Duration
A sprint review usually takes 30 minutes to an hour.
Participants
Purpose
After the sprint is completed, the entire sprint team gathers to discuss the progress of the sprint. This is the time you demonstrate the work to your team, analyze your progress, and determine if the team has met its estimates. This meeting determines the quality of the team's work. And, based on the review, the sprint team adopts changes and works to deliver them in the next phase.
The sprint review meeting will help the team to demonstrate their final output and assess the goals that were set in the sprint planning meeting. Make sure that you complete the work items in your sprint before conducting the demo.
For a two-week sprint, the team conducts one sprint review meeting at the end of the first week and another at the end of the second week.
Backlog Refinement
Otherwise named as 'Backlog Refinement' meeting. It is conducted in the middle of an active sprint or the team conducts it after the sprint is completed. The team discusses on the items to be prioritized for the next sprint.
Duration
It usually takes one hour to half an hour.
Participants
Purpose
During the course of the sprint, the product owner along with the sprint owner will conduct this meeting to discuss the items to be taken up for the next sprint. They can also remove the work items from the backlog, add new items, reassign, modify the priority, and reprioritize the items.
Retrospective
After the sprint review meeting, the team conducts a retrospective meeting. This is where the team decides what worked and what didn't, they can be more effective and productive in the upcoming sprints.
Participants
Duration
The sprint retrospective usually takes an hour.
Purpose
In the sprint retrospective meeting, the team discusses their recently-completed sprints and brainstorms ideas to make the upcoming sprints productive. It focuses more on how the team worked to build the product, instead of what they accomplished at the end of the sprint. To accomplish the goals of the meeting, the team discusses the following:
What is the progress of the sprint?
What were the obstacles during the sprint?
What are the lessons learnt?
How can we improve the upcoming sprint?
General
General meetings are just meet-ups with your team members during the sprint cycle. Anyone in the scrum team can organize this meeting to discuss the sprint. There is no fixed timing or duration for this meeting and it can happen at any time. Check out our
tips and tricks on meetings.