Scrum Revisited

Everyone agrees with the idea of Scrum.  “It sounds like a great idea!”
they say.  Then comes the bomb,  “You mean I can’t schedule a meeting
with someone who is working on a Sprint?”

Another one of my favorites, “I can’t dedicate 4 hours to a Project Design Session.”

Meetings are a hard habit to break and when people hear Scrum, they hear that
they are:

1. Getting assigned more meetings.

2. Not going to have time for the meetings that they already have.

Sometimes we fail to see meetings as the endless cycle that they can be. 
If we are truly focusing on the work and collaborating with each other, meetings are
not all bad.  If we are distracting our task workers with superfluous conversations,
then meetings breed inefficiency. 

The status update questions involved in the Scrum meetings can be answered without
necessarily meeting face-to-face, and sometimes it works to offer that olive branch
to a particularly reluctant person.  Allow then to answer the Scrum questions
via IM or email, or even on the phone.  This seems like much less of an interruption
to them, and still gets them to buy into the process.

I understand the reluctance to see meetings as work, but the truth is that we must
have some venue for collaboration.  To temper the psychological impact of the
word meeting, our PMO and I have decided to rename the Design Meetings to
Design Sessions.  Believe it or not, this seems to have an impact of
the perception of the process.  People hear Project Design Session or Sprint
Design Session as an opportunity to actually collaborate with others instead
of merely enduring another meeting.

Keeping in mind that this series of posts is about selling Scrum within the organization,
not how it should end up.  Getting a few Sprints under your belt is like
pulling teeth, but is also what is required to really prove the method.