Scrum meetings! huh.. I’m not interested...

Have we ever felt that scrum meetings are waste? If the answer is yes, then we need to identify the reasons for that.

Why should we attend scrum meetings? Such concerns are often raised within scrum teams.

There are several reasons that scrum team member feel that such meetings are waste of time.

Let us take example of estimations.

A common problem with a new scrum team can be seen during estimations. It is generally observed with teams transform from waterfall to agile. In such teams, veterans dominate the estimation process and their estimates are finalized. Sometimes the situation gets worse where only veterans/specialists estimate and make a commitment. Junior team members are not involved during estimation. One of the reasons is at times most of the team mates of new agile team had worked together in some projects which followed waterfall methodology and accepted that the ways estimations were done and committed, the specialists know better.

While sometime it is taken as granted in new and immature agile teams, which do not have understood the significance of all the ceremonies of agile, some team mates feel that once the decisions have to be made by these specialists and they will be dominating the ceremonies, what is the use of attending such ceremonies?

Annoyed team mates feel that instead of attending these ceremonies they can put this time for some other purpose.

One other reason is being monotonous and not creating enthusiasm in these ceremonies. Ceremonies are for Transparency, Inspection and Adaptation and when due to any reason, no significant outcome or improvement is visible, it creates dullness.

This is true that apart of other responsibilities, facilitator needs to be energetic and innovative. Bringing new scrum games also play great role in such cases where team mates show unwillingness to join the ceremonies due to such dryness.

ScrumMasters/facilitators need to sense such alarming situations well in time and take the appropriate action before it gets late and spoil the team bonding. ScrumMaster also need to encourage all the team mates time to time, not to participate but participate together in scrum ceremonies.