people having a meeting

– AKA, Worthless meetings — Rest in Peace

“When I die, I hope it’s in a meeting. The transition from life to death will be barely perceptible.”
– Charlie Hawkins

There is more than a little bit of truth to this joke from an unknown author. We’ve all found ourselves trapped in the meeting down the hall from purgatory. Moreover, we all know what a drain that can be, not only on time and energy but on the enthusiasm and interaction that a good meeting is supposed to inspire.

But good meeting habits — both in preparation and execution — are learnable skills. For anyone who has a hand in business get-togethers, it’s imperative that you know the specific problems that can kill your meetings and what you can do about them.

Table of Contents

Deadly Sins 1
Types of Scrum Meetings 2
1. Project Planning Meeting 2
2. Daily Scrum Meeting 2
3. Project Review Meeting 3
4. Project Retrospective Meeting A.K.A. Lessons Learned Meeting 3
2. Actions, Schedule, & Goal Refinement Meeting 3
Who Attends a Scrum Meeting? 3
Scrum Meeting Rules 3
1. Define Clear Objectives 4
2. Begin and End on Time 4
3. Daily Scrums for Monitoring Progress 4
4. Prepare Scrum Meeting Agenda 4
5. Relevancy with the Project Goals 5
6. Continuous Improvement 5
What NOT to do during Scrum meetings 5
Meeting Best Practices 6
Typical (Preferred) Business Meeting Agenda 7
Sample Meeting Agenda, long form 8

Deadly Sins

First, an overview of several deadly meeting sins:

  • Time leaks: This can take several forms. Your meeting might not start on time or it might run way over its appointed end. Perhaps more important is the time between those two poles.
  • Unfocused agenda: This is the meeting that goes nowhere. This evil has several guises. It may be the meeting without an agenda (“let’s get together and shoot the breeze”). It can appear as a meeting that seems to take a swipe at a prearranged agenda: “Another problem is wide-open agenda categories”, says Charlie Hawkins, author of “First Aid for Meetings”. “It’s no more help to have items such as ‘Department Head Reports’ or ‘Old Business’ and ‘New Business'”, unless they are guided and focused.
  • Idea assassins: Even meetings that seem well-orchestrated may not encourage creative, proactive participation. This can mean a meeting leader who doesn’t encourage input from other attendees. Even worse are meeting participants who are quick to criticize an idea before they’ve had a chance to hear it through and give it due consideration. “With that kind of meeting, a lot of ideas never make it to the crawling stage, let alone the running”, notes Hawkins.
  • Bad cop, absent cop: The person in charge of the meeting is the vortex where all these snafus converge. The problem may be a meeting facilitator who runs roughshod over everyone, dictating every element of the meeting and squelching participation. It can also mean a facilitator who does little to direct the meeting, leaving it to drift toward Gilligan’s Island of productivity.

Any of these problems sound familiar? I’ll bet they do, as nearly everyone has endured the pain of meetings like these. But there is hope, that is, if you develop sound strategies for planning and controlling meetings.

If more frequent meetings fit your culture and operational needs, consider a Scrum Meeting (A.K.A. Standup Meeting).

Types of Scrum Meetings

Typically, six types of Scrum meetings occur at a particular time during a Project/Product cycle, and each specific type serves a distinct purpose.

  1. Project Planning Meeting
  2. Daily Scrum Meeting
  3. Project Review Meeting
  4. Project Retrospective Meeting
  5. Backlog Refinement Meeting

To be continued…

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