We have received a lot of feedback on our post: Scrum Events – The too many meetings problem. Many people are reaching out to us and providing feedback on the frustration stemming from meetings.

Meetings in the United States are a big problem.  Nearly 37 billion dollars are wasted annually on unnecessary meetings, and in the Agile community, Scrum meetings are getting the blame.  Our stance is that Scrum is not the issue but rather how companies are conducting meetings.

Below is a list of the 9 top meetings “smells” to recognize and avoid in meetings:

  • Lack of clearly documented Agenda.
    • If a meeting invite doesn’t have an Agenda, I automatically question the importance of the meeting.  Why should I attend a meeting that the organizer doesn’t think is important enough to generate a clearly defined purpose?

My rule: No Agenda NO Meeting.

  • Lack of definition or goal.  What type of meeting will this be?
    • Status:  Share Information, Provide Status, Give Update.  Participants generally will restrict their participation to questions or clarification about the subject at hand.
    • Advance Thinking: Define and\or analyze a problem, planning session, evaluate options.  Participants are asked to advance their knowledge on a meeting topic.  A decision is not necessarily required.
    • Make Decisions:  Address issues, determine solutions and bring to closure.  Decision required
    • Obtain Input: The sponsor is looking for group input.  A decision is not required
    • Retrospective: Strengthen Relationships, Improve Process. Determine what is working? What is not working? What improvements can be implemented?
    • Team Building: Strengthen Relationships, build Mutual Understanding, and build community.
    • Skill Development: Training, Increase subject matter knowledge.
  • Lack of defined roles.
    • How do you expect meeting attendees to participate in a meeting?  Are they a subject matter expert (SME), note taker, active participant, observer, or other?  Give those who will be attending the meeting an opportunity to prepare for the meeting based on the Agenda and the Role that they are expected to perform.
  • Scheduling too much time.
    • When a 30-minute conversation blocks off an hour of your day. Did the participants get off-topic? Was proper preparation completed in advance before the meeting was scheduled?
  • Meetings that continually go over their time limit.
    • Did you invite the right people? Was proper preparation done? Does the meeting organizer have the necessary facilitation skills?
  • Scheduling meetings to ‘discuss’ when a quick conversation is enough.
    • “Discuss” is never a valid meeting topic.  If you just want to discuss something how about we go to coffee or sit in the break room and have quick chat.
  • Meetings with more than 8 people.
    • Meetings with too many participants can be difficult to manage.  If you are scheduling a meeting with more than 8 people check to make sure the right 8 people are invited.  Ask yourself if the proper pre-meeting preparation has been completed to make the meeting valuable for everyone.
  • Meetings that could be covered in an email or quick conversation.
    • Why waste time with a meeting that could be simply done in an email? If you are not sure, start with an email. Better yet, a quick face-to-face conversation.
  • Meetings to review previous meetings (rehash)
    • We have all been to meetings that rehash a previous meeting.  Why? Was the first meeting not enough? Did we not send out notes for the meeting? Did new information develop?

Always ask why.

Every company has issues with too many meetings.  If you would like to develop skills to help your staff have more productive meetings, check out our Facilitation course or the Advanced Scrum Master workshop