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Facilitation

Common Meetings

There are a variety of meetings/ceremonies which are useful to supporting a truly agile environment. Here's a seed list of meeting types that you might use to establish or reinforce an agile development practice.

  • Sprint retrospective (assessing sprint process, identifying improvement areas, etc.)
  • Daily standup / scrum (updating on progress, assigning new work items, etc.)
  • User story workshops (defining user stories, developing a shared understanding of requirements, etc.)
  • Kickoff meeting (setting project objectives, expectations, the tone for team collaboration, etc.)
  • Release / Quarterly planning (setting a longer-term roadmap, establishing a release schedule, etc.)
  • Goal progress update (sharing updates on KRs metrics, progress on goals, relevant learnings, etc.)
  • Craft sync (connecting with colleagues in similar roles to provide work updates, develop goals and processes, share craft knowledge, etc.)
  • Bug triage meeting (addressing and prioritizing reported bugs or issues, determining their severity and how to fix them, etc.)
  • Ideation session (generating new ideas, brainstorming innovating features, etc.)
  • Sprint planning (selecting tasks to work on during the sprint, estimating the effort involved, etc.)
  • Sprint review (demonstrating completed work, updating backlog, etc.)
  • Backlog refinement / grooming (reviewing, prioritizing, refining tasks in backlog, etc.)
  • Customer and product usage insights meeting (discussing insights gathered from product usage, user behavior, customer interactions, etc.)
  • Status meeting (sharing project status updates, discussing issues/topics as a group, etc.)
  • Kanban planning (breaking down work items on kanban board, reviewing cycle times, etc.)
  • Town halls (sharing product demos, progress on metrics, important business announcements, etc.)
  • Review and retrospective for releases (assessing release process, planning for future releases or iterations, etc.)

-- Credit to Atlassian Jira, who provided this list as part of a user survey in Jan '23

Common Meeting Agendas

Basic templates of agendas for common meetings.

Inceptions

1. Intro & Ground Rules (5 min)
2. Project Scope and Motivation (10-15 min)
3. Proposed Solution

_break_

5. Brainstorming session - areas of investment to address the proposed solution (45 min)

_5 min break, Facilitators do a grouping exercise_

6. Risks & Mitigations (1 hour)

_break (usually lunch time)_

7. Epic definitions, initial story writing (1 hour)
8. Retro (30 min)

_go home_

Optional Inception Activities

  • Service Blueprint - promotes a shared understanding of the business process in which a solution will be used. This fosters the team's empathy towards those who will use their software solution

Common Ground Rules

Templates for common meetings.

Team Health Assessments

Do What’s Right
- One voice at a time
- Practice being present
- Discussion is private and non-attributable
- Respect the breaks
- Feel free to speak your mind

Do What Works
- Focus on this meeting
- Stay single threaded
- Exaggerate your video presence

Be Kind
- Speak from the “I” perspective
- Listen deeply enough to be changed
- “Yes, and …” over “Yes, but …”
- Feedback and questions are welcome