Sprint review - agenda
Dear all,
According to your experience, how is the agenda of the sprint review is formed? What are exaclty the key components? In my case, the context is the following: I participate as a Scrum Master in a Tribe consisted of 4 teams. Each team has its own Scrum Master, Product Owner and Development Team. All the teams work towards one product, but from a different aspect of it. Each team performs also its own daily, planning and retrospective meetings. Regarding the sprint review meeting though, we have decided that it will be a unique meeting for all the teams, in terms of simplicity and it is also a good way to be all aligned and informed about the accomplishments of each team. As far as the agenda concerns, each team presents the tasks that are closed during the previous sprint, and some of the tasks that are planned to be completed on the following 1-2 sprints. Demos are presented as well, if the team decides to. That said, some complaints have come up, regarding the agenda of the meeting. Some of the Team members claim that it's not that easy to attend the whole meeting and that the stakeholders don't actually give a proper feedback. Some of them even proposed to eliminate the agenda and present only the problems that we might face during the sprint, without mentioning the closed issues. What is your opinion on these? Do you have any insights? I would also like to add, that we (the four Scrum Masters) have adjusted the format of the presentation several times, but still some of the members are not satisfied.
Thank you in anvance!
In Scrum, a Sprint Review is a collaborative working session, not just presentations or "demos". The critical output is to have an updated Product Backlog. Is that actually happening? Other than that, there doesn't necessarily have to be an agenda at all.
I agree with @Ian Mitchell. The Sprint Review does not need an agenda as it is not a meeting with a presentation. It is a opportunity for the Scrum Team and the stakeholders to collaborate on assessing the work that has been done and identify the work that needs to be done. Instead of talking through a list of things and then doing a demonstration, why not show the product in it's current state at the end of the Sprint and ask the stakeholders direct questions? Such as "as you can see we changed this field from free-form text to a drop down selection. We saw that you were frequently using the same values but different individuals were using varying capitalization or abbreviations. By making it a drop down list, it will be easier to standardize the data for reporting purposes. What are your thoughts?". Don't wait for the stakeholders to ask questions, start the conversation. The more you do this, the more comfortable the stakeholders will become starting them on their own.
Maybe it will be useful and inspiring for you..
This example of agenda can be helpful to involve everyone to cooperate
- VISION (PO) - Recall the product vision first and show the curent place in product roadmap for everyone. The main question for this topic is "Where we are in our product now?"
- VALUE (PO,DEV) - Introduce the increment value for product in current sprint. Try to focus more on business value than on individual functionalities. Supporting question for this topic is "How this valiue help us to complete out product vision?"
- COLABORATION (PO,DEV,SH) - Try to cooperate with stakeholders about the sum of the increments is presented to answer the question "What we are going to do next to achive our goals?"
- REVISION (PO,SH) - Remember to spend time with product backlog as a whole. Time/Scope/Budget is also imoprtant topic for stakeholders.
@Ian Mitchell @Daniel Wilhite, thank you both for your comments! We will definitely consider them as a team.