Scrum ceremonies are not additional meetings
A common mistake that we see in Agile transformation projects is how the Scrum ceremonies are introduced. We consistently see that the Scrum ceremonies are added on top of existing meeting schedules. This of course results in even more meetings.
Why is this a problem?
Let’s be clear about this up front. The Scrum ceremonies are intended to replace existing project planning meetings and therefore reduce the amount of time spent in meetings.
If you add these ceremonies on top of any other regular project meetings they you are taking away valuable time that the team cam used to add value to your products.
Stopping all meetings is not the solution
You might argue that if we want to maximise the time for value creation, then we must minimise the time for meetings. The logical conclusion to this is to have no meetings are all. But this is not the solution. This is the uncontrolled chaos along the road to project failure.
The solution is a balance that adds value
The Scrum ceremonies try to achieve a balance between time spent on product value creation and the time necessary to provide a coherent and over arching structure to the value creation process.
The most important ceremony in achieving this is the “daily stand-up”. The daily stand-up eliminates almost all of the typical project progress reporting meetings. What’s left can be comfortably covered by project tooling to generate progress charts over a longer period.
If you want to know if a team is making progress or not then find out where the teams daily stand-up is go along and listen to what they have to say.