How Status saves time from attending Agile/Scrum project meetings

Working in an Agile/Scrum environment usually means a set of prescribed meetings that are part of the regular project cadence. These meetings include daily stand-ups, sprint planning meetings, sprint refinement meetings, sprint retrospectives, architectural reviews, dev syncs, and ad-hoc meetings. These meetings quickly add to a lot of administrative time and less time for development. Here is the approximate breakdown of the meetings and time spent in a sprint.

5 - Hours - .5 in a day in stand-up meetings x 10 days in a two week sprint
2 - Hours - Sprint Planning
2 - Hours - Sprint Refinement
1 - Hour - Sprint Retro
2.5 - Hours - Dev and architectural meetings
2.5 - Hours - Ad-Hoc meetings
15 - Total Hours

Every team member generally attends each meeting above, so you have to multiply 15 hours by the team size. Let's consider a team size of 10 members.

15 Hours x 10 = 150 hours of team time every two weeks

We generally have 80 hours in a two-work week; based on this estimate, nearly 20% of that time is spent in meetings, which can be either productive or inefficient. Based on your experience, how would you rate your meeting experience? The next time you're in one of these meetings, how would you rate it? We have spent 1000+ hours in meetings and have concluded that most of them could be more efficient. Here are some examples of signs that your meetings could be better.

- Daily Stand-ups take too long, and member status reporting is difficult to discern. They usually take longer than the suggested 15 minutes, which can be 30, 45, or an hour daily. Team members mention work item numbers instead of what they are actually working on.
- Sprint Planning: these are meant to plan work for upcoming sprints, but often devolve into a design session where planning doesn't happen.
- Sprint Refinement: Work is set to be prioritized and removed, but disagreements about the top priority also occur, and items are seldom removed from the project backlog and descoped. The outcomes of these meetings could be better.
- Sprint Retro: These need to happen for continual improvement, but if they often don't produce improvements, they are only a list of issues that are never resolved.
- Dev and Architectural meetings: These are great if they are not about current sprint items but not so great when they are about active work items in the sprint. The meetings are essential in a project if they produce the defined architecture and dev designs. If, instead, they are about the work already underway, those affected work items likely won't be completed due to a lack of understanding.
- Ad-hoc Meetings: These meetings generally resolve misunderstandings about acceptance criteria, development implementation, blockers, or other project details. They can be beneficial when they have a clear outcome and harmful when no resolutions or action items are produced.

We built KS status with the primary goals of reducing or speeding up meetings and eliminating the negative aspects of sprint meetings. We started with the two that could be improved quickly and significantly impact work efficiency.

- Remove Daily Stand-ups: We focused on providing a view or status for the daily stand-up that could eliminate the meeting. Imagine not meeting for 30 minutes every day and instead having a way to see the precise status of every team member. Another item to consider is the context-switching costs of joining the daily meeting and returning to work. It's not just 30 minutes, more like an hour.
- Drastically Shorten Sprint Planning: In Status, this meeting will be reduced from hours to minutes. The work for analysis and defining user stories and bugs has already been done, and all work is in a "Build Ready" state before you can start the planning process. Work is then assigned and estimated to sprint resources available in an intuitive and unique interface.

We will continue to evolve Status to reduce meeting times and thus improve team efficiency. Let's revisit the total hours before and consider the effects of working in Status vs. another project management.

Time Savings

Daily Stand-ups: 5 X 10 = 50 hours
Sprint Planning: 1.75 x 10 = 17.5 hours
Total Hours: 67.5 Hours per sprint
Per Year: 26 (two-week intervals) x 67.5 = 1,755 hours saved per year

Now, think about those team members with multiple teams who join meetings and all the time savings they can achieve.