Making Global Teams Agile: Meeting Strategies

For the past 2 years, we've been working hard to get to a simple, standard process for making Agile and SCRUM work in almost any team dynamic. Specifically, our teams focus on making resources that live and work all over the globe behave and feel like one highly effective team without undue overhead.

The keys to success in building an effective team, in our experience, are picking an agile methodology (in this case SCRUM) that allows for frequent communication in short, structured ways (Meetings) and selecting tools (Tools) and templates (Documentation) that ensure all team members and stakeholders communicate consistently and effectively with minimal wasted time and effort. A real commitment to stakeholder / client communication and interpretation and ensuring a trusted presence (real or virtual) with the customer is often crucial as well. In this article we focus on what it takes to really establish a great meeting strategy.

A great meeting strategy is the first place to start in getting a project off the ground. Standard SCRUM calls for several types of standard meetings, including: Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Demonstrations, and Sprint Retrospectives. These regular meetings allow the team to understand what the customer wants to see next, demonstrate progress, refine requirements and requests, and improve the general process. Mixed with the daily SCRUM (the daily status meeting that gets the team all talking and working together constantly), just establishing these meetings on a consistent schedule and setting up ground rules and agendas is possibly the most important property of an effective, reliable project team.

Of course simply establishing some meetings and agendas is not enough to make a project or even a meeting strategy successful. Every meeting has to have a clear purpose, ground rules, and a known agenda that remains consistent over time. You also have to place meetings at the right time of day (beginning and end of day meetings work a lot better than mid-day meetings because they interrupt less work) and keep them as short and effective as possible with manageable goals. A Backlog grooming meeting should happen once every sprint (we find 2 week sprints are the most effective) and should have the goal of refining and prioritizing just enough requirements to cover the next 2 sprints in about 60 - 90 minutes. Daily SCRUM meetings should last less than 30 minutes and should allow every team member to speak quickly just to identify progress on specific work and raise (but not discuss in detail) any concerns, problems, or open questions. The last few minutes of every meeting must be reserved to discuss follow-up actions and next steps to set expectations for the next meeting or for progressing work. The goal of any meeting strategy should be to reserve as much time for the team to do what they need to complete work and demonstrate it every sprint while ensuring plenty of opportunity to reserve time for frequent course correction from the customer, client, and project leaders between sprints, milestones, and releases.

Finally, establishing regular channels of communication within the project team for standard activities like testing, design reviews, code reviews, and commitments is just as important as the standard SCRUM meetings themselves. Sprints (particularly short ones) move too fast to assume critical activities will happen without this planning. If you are relying on a development lead or architect to ensure quality (we recommend this highly if you care about maintaining feature velocity and controlling defects) he or she should have 2 - 3 scheduled, structured times to intervene and review work every sprint and teams should get used to presenting their work in this way. Once again perfection is not the goal, but intervention is not perfection - just exceedingly better than chaos. Likewise, testing should commence and become the focus of each sprint at a standard, scheduled time and features should be frozen, and some time for test review should be reserved as well.

In the end an effective meeting strategy dictates how much effective working time left to a team to really develop features and functions and establishes the culture and communication of the team. Done correctly, it allows a team to learn to work together and respect each others contributions and ensures that everyone pulls together to get the job done. Balancing communication with efficiency is always a challenge, but if you can reserve at least 30 hours of a 40 hour week (ideally more) for actually getting work done, the project will almost certainly be on the best possible track. From here, making the project team great is more about other things that we'll talk about in a later article.