A meeting plays a significant role in scrum-based project management style. According to agile and scrum principles, the daily meeting is an indispensable ritual that helps the team collaborate and stay aligned to the goal. Scrum is an iterative process in which purpose-driven meetings help the team analyze each stage of the sprint cycle before moving on to the next stage. The meetings improve team collaboration and help ensure a quality outcome at the end of every sprint.
Zoho Sprints allows you to schedule a meeting with the time of meeting, the duration, and the frequency of recurrence for a particular Sprint and create the participants' list. You can also configure a reminder to be triggered before the meeting time.
The typical scenarios that call for a meeting could be Sprint planning, Daily Stand-up, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, or a General meeting. The meetings can be conducted both online and offline based on your participants availability and locations. You can integrate with cloud meeting tools like Zoho Meeting to conduct your meetings online.
Sprint planning
Sprint planning is the event that kick-starts each sprint. As a prerequisite to this, the project owner is expected to have the list of user stories ready in the product backlog.
The primary aim of sprint planning is to identify a sprint goal. Following this you can create a sprint backlog to work towards the goal. You can pick the tasks for the Sprint Backlog from the product backlog, which ideally contains all the user stories.
- Remember to pick the highest priority work item from the list first.
- Never over commit, because it increases the chances that you will fail to deliver the work.
Participants
- Team Owner and Admin
- Project Manager (a.k.a. sprint owner) of the sprint
- Members of the sprint
Duration
This is the primary meeting where the entire team will decide on the workable items for the next two to four weeks. So the duration should be a minimum of one hour for a one-week sprint. If the sprint is for two weeks, then two hours of meeting is recommended. It's not mandatory to conduct a two-hour planning meeting for a two-weeks sprint. The team can spend one hour on the first week discussing the estimates, and the remaining hour on the second week.
Daily stand-up
The next event in the sprint is the daily stand-up. This is similar to a daily status meeting, but it's also a bit more than that. The daily scrum is a time-boxed meeting that lasts up to 15 minutes. It's often suggested that the team remain standing to help keep the meeting short. This gives an opportunity for the whole team to share where each of them stands and get an idea of how they're progressing as a team. It's also a chance to discuss any impediments that are stopping them from achieving the Sprint goal within the set time.
Participants
- Team Owner and Admin
- Project Manager (a.k.a. sprint owner) of the sprint
- Members of the sprint
Duration
A stand-up is a 15-minute meeting and should not exceed the scheduled time.
Sprint Review
The next event is the sprint review. As a general rule of thumb, each sprint is planned for about two weeks. At the end of each sprint, the Project Owner, the Sprint Owner, and the team members come together to review the progress made on the product, acknowledge what was accomplished, and assess how well the completed work meets the requirements. This is also a good time to share feedback on what could be improved in future Sprints.
Duration
A sprint review usually takes 30 minutes to an hour.
Participants
- Workspace Owner and Admin
- Project Manager (a.k.a. sprint owner) of the sprint
- Members of the sprint
- Clients
Sprint Retrospective
It's quite common to think that sprint review and sprint retrospective are the same, but they're actually two distinct events. The sprint retrospective is a chance to examine the process followed and identify ways to improve the quality of outcome and effectiveness of the next Sprint. It brings the scrum team together to discuss the sprint and identify areas where there is room for improvement. The lessons learnt from the retrospective can be implemented to optimize the next sprint.
Participants
- Team Owner and Admin
- Project Manager (a.k.a. sprint owner) of the sprint
- Members of the sprint
- Clients
Duration
The sprint retrospective usually takes an hour.
General meeting
As the term suggests, a general meeting can be about anything related to the sprint or the team that the members need to discuss. This meeting is specific to Zoho Sprints and is not part of the scrum ritual.
General meetings are just meet-ups with your team members during the sprint cycle. Anyone in the scrum team can organize this meeting to discuss the sprint. There is no fixed timing or duration for this meeting and it can happen at any time.
Access privileges for meeting