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5 Scrum Meeting Tips to Help Fix Inefficient Sprints
Improve your sprints and bring your team closer together
Nowadays, most software development teams have adopted agile methodologies for their development process. Scrum, in particular, can be found everywhere — in small agencies doing outsourced work for clients, in big corporations with many teams and many products, and of course in small startups where cross-functional agile development work is key to survival.
Scrum has just a few basic rules, and this low-entry barrier certainly helped to make it the go-to methodology for software-developing companies. The initial cost of setting it up is low, as it does not require lengthy training or many prerequisites. It doesn’t require expensive certificates, consultants, or coaches. And it’s become so popular over the past few decades that most companies have a hard time arguing against it. After all, it works well for so many companies!
But whilst introducing Scrum should help teams become more efficient, the reality is that Scrum is easy to start with but hard to master. There are a few key elements of Scrum that — if left out — make it much harder to have efficient sprints. On the other hand, as there are only a few elements to Scrum, teams tend to try to “fix” things by adapting Scrum to their needs instead of understanding the basics, often ending up with a bloated process.
There are already many great articles describing ways to make your development process more iterative and agile. You can adopt feature flags to make smaller and safer iterations, put more value into customer feedback, test your hypotheses with MVPs, or improve your team communication with better user stories. But if your Scrum team’s foundation is not yet set, you will just end up doing all those things inefficiently.
If you feel like the Scrum ceremonies are draining your energy because of a lack of focus or efficiency, if your team feels like it is not so much a team but more just a group of people who happen to work with the same repositories, or if your team has done many sprints already but there are still knowledge silos, you may need to check your Scrum basics before searching anywhere else.
