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How to add Non Scrum Meetings on Board

Last post 04:48 pm July 25, 2022 by Ryan Kent
6 replies
11:55 am July 21, 2022

Hi Guys 

I have an issue that the team makes alot non scrum meetings either with managment or with stakeholders and i want to put this oboard and calculate the time lost so we can take an action . what's the best way to represent these meetings on the board ?


06:53 pm July 21, 2022

Why do you need to represent these meetings on the board at all?

I've never seen a need to represent meetings or vacations or things like that on the board. The effect of meetings will be made visible in the team's ability to do work. If there are too many meetings, the team will end up reducing the scope of the Sprint Goal (if the meetings are known up-front) or may run into problems achieving the Sprint Goal (if the meetings are not known up-front).


07:27 pm July 21, 2022

These meetings have no place in the Sprint Backlog as you have indicated that they are not related to the work of the Sprint.  The Sprint Backlog only contains items that are taken from the Product Backlog or added in order to achieve the Sprint Goal.  

There is no board mentioned in the Scrum Guide so you can decide to put anything you want on your board.  If you choose to have items that are not representing the Sprint Backlog, you can decide how you want to do that.  I have never experienced a need for this type of thing and have always used a board to visual the Sprint Backlog so that it is transparent to others what work is being done for the Product. 


09:01 pm July 21, 2022

I have an issue that the team makes alot non scrum meetings either with managment or with stakeholders and i want to put this oboard and calculate the time lost so we can take an action . what's the best way to represent these meetings on the board ?

If you are able to take action as you say, why lose time having these meetings at all?

 


03:10 pm July 22, 2022

The stakeholders calls developers for meetings outside the formal events and it happens alot. This consumes alot if time. I want to monitor how much time the developers are wasting. How can i know that if it's not logged 


03:22 pm July 22, 2022

Why do you need to 'monitor' their time? 



Are these meetings valuable, and helping to achieve the sprint goal? 



If not, do you think a catalogue of minutes is the thing that will make people change their behaviour? 



It sounds like you need to help the team say no, and coach non-scrum team members in how to properly bring things to the team. 


10:24 am July 24, 2022

Hi Haytham. Context switching always comes at a cost, and I can appreciate your desire to make this transparent. I would agree with the previous comments about not including this as part of your Sprint Backlog, or putting it on the board for tracking purposes. Rather than adding it to your board, consider other ways to make this transparent.

First some supporting information. Some research shows that it can take an average of 23 minutes to regain focus after a distraction https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf

If we went with a conservative impact of say 15 mins per switch, Scrum Events and refinement alone can contribute up to a 9% context switching impact in a 2 week Sprint (assuming just Scrum Events and team members working on 1 PBI). That is about 6.5 hours. Now when it comes to Scrum Events, the juice is certainly worth the squeeze given all of the benefits each Event brings. Adding other meetings and distractions on top of this however, can be very impactful to the team’s ability to focus on their commitment to the Sprint Goal.

One way I have made this transparent is by creating a spreadsheet that calculates impact based on the number of activities in a day, using a conservative 15 min impact per switch. I have found this useful when illustrating to the team and those outside of the team. You can also use something like this to show the impact of working on multiple PBIs, being spread across multiple team etc. One extra 1 hour meeting, means more like 1 hour and 15 mins worth of impact. Time lost to context switching can add up greatly over the course of a Sprint and I think it is worth bringing transparency to this, and supporting the team in finding ways to eliminate any extraneous meetings or distractions.  

 


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