How to Avoid Common Pitfalls Made in Meetings

By Moye Balogun (Image From: http://www.fruitfulproperty.com/buy-to-let-investment.html)

Maintain the Agenda
The key to staying on track during meetings is by maintaining the agenda (Rose). During the daily stand-up meetings, protecting the agenda should be the main focus (Rose). This is done by ensuring that everyone understands their roles, which entails each member knowing when it’s their turn to “participate, speak up, or just listen” (Rose). This is important because a key part of creating good feedback loops is keeping the team listening and not interrupted by outside interference (Rose). The product owner is the member that should be the one mostly listening to “make sure the team is working on the highest value stories” (Rose). The scrum master should be the one ensuring that the product owners do not interfere with the team’s process (Rose). This is an important role because managers who aren’t familiar with Agile will misinterpret the daily meetings and assume the team’s role is to give a status update to the scrum master (Rose).

Multitasking
Multitasking can be defined as completing numerous task simultaneously in hopes that they can all be finished quicker (Rose). Though multitasking is usually encouraged, with Agile it can come at a heavy price because people can’t efficiently work on tasks evenly (Rose). People will often spend too much time just trying to figure out what they’re doing (Rose). Furthermore, with so many opportunities for distraction, multitasking is extremely inefficient (Rose). However, the Agile framework reduces this inefficiency since the whole team is focused on the fewest number of tasks (Rose). Also, since all the activities are timeboxed, the team is forced to finish one task before they start another, which minimizes the inefficient method of multitasking (Rose). Doing work this way will make for a shorter meeting time, where a single item is completed, rather than a long meeting where several tasks are left unfinished (Rose).

Works Cited

Rose, Doug. “Planning Your Sprints.” Lynda.com - from LinkedIn, 29 Sept. 2015, www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Planning-your-sprints/175075/438001