by Facilitation Expert | Aug 31, 2017 | Meeting Support, Scrum Events
Agile’s Scrum Master facilitator techniques ensure that business communities get quick and responsive results. Constant feedback helps teams prioritize and make adjustments. A Scrum Master facilitates against impediments and for product owners’ requirements to support development team efforts. Scrum Master’s experience and discipline prove that every structured meeting should embrace ‘agile’ practices.
Professional facilitation lends essential skills to the Scrum Master role because an agile environment demands frequent meetings. Much of what Scrum Masters have learned applies to your meetings as well. Basic Scrum Master facilitator techniques include:
Leveraging Agile Scrum Master Facilitator Techniques
- Asking open-ended questions
- Bringing people together who should listen to each other but don’t
- Consensus building where everyone wins, NOT voting where there are winners and losers
- Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed, including preparing and post-processing results
- Helping the Development Team to continually improve their methods
- Mediating conflicts that arise during product development
- Providing visuals (eg., agendas and other information radiators) that provide focus and enable measurement of progress
- Providing a variety of activities to stimulate breakthrough, employee engagement, and product innovation
- Removing impediments to the Scrum Team’s progress
- Structured collaborative tools—too many to list here but many of them are also used in waterfall and traditional phase gate approaches
- Timeboxing and constantly pushing the Pareto Principle to get the most out of the least
Clear benefits derive from an agile approach supporting Scrum Master facilitator techniques including:
- Documented and shared knowledge about product and process decisions
- Early identification of high-benefit opportunities
- Encouraging flexibility and adjustments around unexpected developments (that always develop in projects)
- Frequent re-assessment to identify appropriate acceleration or course corrections
- In-depth exploration of more evidence and factors than normally considered by unstructured, intuitive methods
A Scrum Master Facilitator Generates Focus
Keeping participants conscious to “be here now” burns a lot of fuel. Additionally, keeping multiple concepts in mind, at the same time, is virtually impossible. Highly intelligent individuals can rarely think about more than four concepts at once, and thinking about only two at once is optimal, therefore . . . Focus. The hardest part of any session is getting a group of people to focus on the same thing at the same time with a common meaning and intent. Be sure to keep the energy flowing and take a break(s) if necessary.
- Conduct frequent breakout sessions to keep the energy flowing.
- Consider ergonomic stretches and breathing exercises to keep participants vibrant.
- If necessary, use timeboxing rather than burning out participants. A subsequent meeting can pick up where you leave off, with fresh energy.
- Schedule the most important stuff early in your meeting and, when possible, schedule the meeting for the first part of the day.
- We believe that two ten-minute breaks are superior to the traditional fifteen to twenty-minute breaks traditionally offered. We do project counting timers, however, and do not allow breaks to become eleven minutes (or longer). Do NOT penalize people who are on time by waiting for people who are not.
Demand Evidence (Think Deeply)
Challenge the intuitive, short-term thinking for support that takes a long-term view and deeper insight into implications and consequences. What are the deeper associations? Because the cost of omissions, that is ‘missing stuff’, is exorbitantly high (especially with information technologies). We need to value and appreciate some of the longer exercises that may be required to bring discussions to a higher level. By challenging and demanding evidence, the facilitator removes the myopic view from participants and forces them to be integrative with their thinking. But understand, that causal diagrams take longer than ideation sessions.
Visual imagery also stimulates making it easier to analyze. Images (i.e., iconic) and sketches (i.e., illustrative) are more efficient for capturing complex relationships than narrative (i.e., written) terms. If you work in a multi-national organization, graphical displays mitigate some of the challenges associated with translations and transliterations. Mapping stimulates—the power of patterns remains unchallenged and continues to be supported by most scientific research across a broad spectrum of disciplines. Mapping, such as logical models and process flow diagrams, makes it easier to identify omissions and more fully explain the complex relationships that exist among the components being discussed.
Write That Down
In addition to providing visual stimulation, if it is not written down it will be forgotten. In other words, if it is not written down, it does not happen. Do not waste everyone’s time, please write it down. It is easier to delete later than to recall what was said, “back then.”
Zen of the Experience (use all the senses):
When physical/ spatial, visual, and sound (and optimally even taste and smell) harmonize, we create more vivid associations that improve our memory recall. Who cannot recall the smell, standing at the seashore, of an “ocean breeze”? To amplify your meeting’s ‘Zen’, use analogies. Educators have known for centuries that learning is amplified when explained via analogy or metaphor. For nearly thirty years now, we have been promoting the use of analogy or metaphor as a way to explain the agenda and how the pieces fit together.
Combining the Scrum Master facilitator practices makes it easier for your participants to act on knowledge accessed and developed during your meetings and workshops. For additional activities to support your sessions, search for some of the many tools we provide that support collaborative sorting, experience prototyping, idea generation, and other simulations that build consensus and higher-quality deliverables, FAST.
Experience and evidence for the preceding derives partially from Cara Turner, who discusses proof about the relationship of agile methods and neuroscience at her blog site, facilitatingagility.com. Cara, along with numerous authors and scientists she cites in support, refer to key practices proven to improve both decision quality and project quality.
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
by Facilitation Expert | Aug 10, 2017 | Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills, Meeting Agendas, Meeting Structure, Meeting Support, Meeting Tools
Below are eight habits we call meeting killers that every facilitator, or meeting leader, must avoid.
Neglect to prepare your participants in advance.
Meeting Killers: Have you ever been in a meeting where someone asks: “So, what’s this all about?”
People attending a meeting should know the purpose of the meeting before they accept. Since their input is presumably valuable, provide them with a pre-read package. Participants should show up properly prepared to make the contributions they seek. That’s why we call them subject matter experts. Read our article on “Meeting Announcements” for other meeting announcement considerations prior to shipping your pre-read packages.
Penalize people who are on time.
#7 – Disregard the use of any ground rules.
Meeting Killers: Imagine it’s one of those days when you have two or three meetings back to back. Time is precious, so you make sure to arrive on time, only to discover the meeting will be delayed (and possibly run late) because the session leader insists on waiting for latecomers.
As a professional session leader, do NOT wait for people who are running late. You do NOT want to penalize people who are on time. You don’t even know if the people who are tardy will show up at all, so start promptly.
If someone does show up late and needs to be informed or updated, pair them off with someone and ask them to go in the hallway for a quick debrief, while you continue.
The last thing you want to do is stop the meeting and review (i.e., repeat) what has already transpired. Do NOT penalize everyone else and force them to waste time reviewing things they’ve already heard once, twice, or even three times. Note that the first ground rule we recommend is “Be Here Now”. Control context and be an enforcer, not a wimp. We also recommend starting your meetings five minutes after the normal start time. Conclude five minutes early. Be the one kind enough to know that participants deserve a few minutes between meetings to attend to stuff. Enhance your track record with punctuality and your reputation will soar.
Don’t have a deliverable or any concept of what DONE looks like.
Meeting Killers: Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone seemed to have their own discrete and sometimes competing purpose?
As a professional leader, it’s your job to ensure everyone fully understands the purpose of the meeting. Professional leaders always have a vision of success. More concretely, they can visualize what the meeting will produce or deliver. Steven Covey used the expression “Start with the End in Mind.” We prefer the expression of knowing what DONE looks like.
Don’t have an agenda or any structure.
Meeting Killers: Have you ever been in a meeting where one comment (or one person) suddenly sends the discussion—or, worse yet, the entire meeting–in a completely new and unrelated direction?
As the meeting leader, it’s your job to prevent meeting scope creep from the beginning until the end. Limit discussion unrelated to your deliverable. Your agenda is a road map that tells the group how you are going to get them to the deliverable. There is more than one right answer, so do not permit any arguments around context. As a leader, you have predetermined the best way, given your constraints, to get there. Not having an agenda is truly the ‘kiss of death.’ Our curriculum focuses on agendas and tools. We provide many specific and useful suggestions for building agendas, here are a few:
Begin every sentence with the word “I” as in “I think . . .”, “I want . . .”, “I need . . .”, “I believe . . .”, “I feel . . .”
Meeting Killers: Ever heard your meeting leader constantly refer to themselves in the first person?
As a leader, you should consistently substitute integral terms and pluralistic rhetoric such as we, us, and ours. Make sure everyone knows that this meeting is NOT about you. Walk the talk by controlling your rhetoric.
Better yet, don’t shut up. Start talking and never stop.
Meeting Killers: Ever go to a meeting and say nothing?
Why? Because the leader spoke one, long sentence from the beginning of the meeting to the very end. When anyone else is speaking, rarely should you, the leader, interrupt or cut them off. Remind them that you are servile, and the meeting serves to support them.
Disregard the use of any ground rules.
Meeting Killers: Have you been to a meeting where everyone is head down, buried in their laptops or phones?
Do not permit dysfunctional behavior. If everyone behaves and does whatever they want, you might as well not have a meeting. The adage, don’t text and drive applies equally well for a meeting. A meeting where participants aren’t paying attention (i.e., texting or checking email) is bound to end in a wreck—one where the damage means economic loss for the company. If email must be responded to, ask them to take it out into the hallway where their keyboard inputting is not such a distraction. Build and use ground rules. You’ll be glad you did.
Ignore your virtual or remote participants entirely.
Meeting Killers: Notice how teleconference or video-presence participants contribute much less frequently than live participants?
Remote folks are frequently ignored. Begin with them instead. Do not string them in at the end for additional comments. Ask them to take the lead. If you take a round-robin approach, start with them. If you create a virtual seating arrangement, put them upfront. However, make the ground rules apply to them as well. No multi-tasking, working on email, or shopping.
SUMMARY: MEETING KILLERS
Follow the suggestions above to ensure that the output and next steps of your meeting are clear, certain, and shared. Wouldn’t it be great if participants left the meeting saying:
“It’s pretty clear what I have to do next to add value.”
What are we missing? Let us know and reply with some irritants we left out. Enter your comment or reply below.
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
by Facilitation Expert | Jul 13, 2017 | Communication Skills, Facilitation Skills, Leadership Skills
With facilitation today there is no common, shared body of knowledge. In part, because facilitation is a fuzzy word and widely applied, there is no single definition — making Facilitation Certification fuzzy as well.
In North America, there are three primary methods for certifying professional skills and knowledge. None of the methods is necessarily superior or inferior when compared with each other.
- Association; e.g., Project Management Institute, Scrum Alliance, etc.
- Service Provider; e.g., Microsoft®, Oracle®, etc.
- University; e.g., Georgetown University, UCLA, etc.
First, consider the credibility of a facilitation certification:
Successfully complete a rigorous, five-day MG RUSH course to earn Certified Structured Professional Facilitator (CSPF) status, a premier facilitation certification
- Facilitation: The definition of the word facilitation is applied in many ways. There is no central body defining or controlling what facilitation is or where/ how it is applied. A search via Google or Bing returns many disparate uses of the term facilitation. Definitions range from facilitation among business groups, social groups, mediation, and dispute resolution, to teaching/instruction, community development, and many more.
At MGRUSH our instruction in facilitation supports all of the mentioned situations. Through a structured approach, we focus on business and organizational challenges, especially planning and understanding requirements. We cover workgroups, projects, executive sessions, board meetings, and workshops of all types and durations.
- Certification: Most professional certifications include these elements:
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- Body of knowledge (BoK), representing best practices and best of breed for industry standards
- Minimum level of practice with the certifiable skills and knowledge in appropriate, demonstration situations
- Test(s) or other repeatable, comparable, standards of the skill and knowledge being practiced
There are three global associations that provide certification focused exclusively on facilitation. They include the Association for Talent Development (ATD), the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), and the International Institute for Facilitation (INIFAC).
There is no central, unambiguous standard-setting agency. However, the IAF focuses its promotional efforts on the “core competencies” of facilitation. There are less than 500 IAF Certified Professional Facilitators (CPF), most of them outside of the USA. The INIFAC facilitation core competencies are quite similar but their requirements are more stringent. There are less than thirty INIFAC Certified Master Facilitators (CMF) worldwide in 2018.
The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation published in 2005 provides a compendium of articles written by 30 authors, assembled around a set of core competencies. See the comparison charts below. Neither the IAF nor INIFAC provide facilitation training through their organization. Rather, they rely on outside experts such as ourselves to prepare students.
Related associations include the International Business Analyst’s Association (IBAA), Project Management Institute (PMI), and Scrum Alliance
Both the IAF and the INIFAC operate in a manner similar to the Project Management Institute (PMI), the International Business Analyst’s Association (IIBA), or similar associations. They provide a body of knowledge, and certification testing, and rely on Registered Educational Providers (REP) such as ourselves for training on the core competencies. Current BoK includes the Project Management Institute’s PMBok (Sixth Edition, 2017) and the International Business Analyst’s Association BABok (Third Edition, 2015). We rely partially on our certification and endorsement among these and other Associations as Registered Educational Providers to justify the certification of our robust curriculum and proven teaching methods.
For in-depth training on facilitation, students depend on the best efforts of commercial organizations (like ours), universities, and clubs/ associations. Frequently, the university certifications derive from trainers that also teach for us, or our competitors. No university can satisfy the rigorous requirements mentioned above (body of knowledge, testing, experience, requirements, etc.) without borrowing heavily on the knowledge codified by others, such as our MGRUSH Professional Facilitation curriculum, classroom immersion, practice, feedback, and testing.
Thousands of companies provide varying levels of certification for the products and services they provide. Motorola famously certified Green Belts, Black Belts, and Master Black Belts from its very own, Motorola University before the intellectual property for Six Sigma® was purchased by Underwriter’s Laboratories.
Microsoft®, Oracle®, and hundreds of others in the Information Technology space continue to provide certification by product type and role. Needless to say, a certain cachet derives from branded certification that exceeds that of independent associations that are not privy to all the working parts of proprietary solutions.
There are various clubs/ associations that promote facilitation (in any of its many meanings) as a means to build community and share tips and techniques. They generally promote whatever form of facilitation the local association/ club prefers.
Among commercial trainers, MGRUSH provides some of the most long-standing, recognized, and well-developed facilitation trainers and certifiers available. Our MGRUSH Professional Facilitation Reference Manual augments nearly one thousand documents, templates, and visual aids available online. Thus, our alumni instantly access our body of knowledge, downloading agendas, tools, and methods. The integrated resources contain contributions by the trainers, students, and others who are continuously testing in the field. We also apply a soft test to the usefulness of our certification by mentioning our training in students’ resumes. With our longevity and deep content, students frequently include our certification in their CVs and Biographical Sketches.
Discover how our structured form of facilitation creates amazing results, proven to make you a better leader.
The competencies gained from our rigorous training are inspirational and practical, you will love the results. For information on claiming your educational units for the IBAA, PMI, or Scrum Alliance click here.
For a comparison of the three Associations’ various core competencies for facilitation scroll down. We also demonstrate to what extent our MG RUSH Professional Facilitation curriculum covers the IAF core competencies. (MG RUSH does not provide IAF certification. Nor are we formally endorsed by IAF. For IAF certification guidelines, please visit their website.)
If you want, drop us a note and we’ll send you a table that compares over twenty facilitation certification organizations. We have compiled attributes such as:
- Facilitation certification class pricing ranges from USD$11,000 (Ten Directions®) to $200 (Lego® Education)
- Facilitation certification class durations range from one day (various) to sixteen days (UCLA—plus offsite reading and exercises).
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
by Facilitation Expert | Jun 15, 2017 | Facilitation Skills
Even the best facilitators in the world will fail miserably if they don’t show up prepared. Anyone can succeed with enough forethought, as shared with us by an MGRUSH Alumna.
“Workshop success! I’m happy to share that yesterday’s SE Asia Region planning workshop went off wonderfully. My boss and VPs all commented that it was clear a lot of thought and care went into the format, sessions, and questions, all to good use.”
Workshop Success: Professional Training
Workshop Success — Bubble Chart
If you want to get better at facilitating, nothing beats immersion and practice.
“Again, I want to emphasize how useful our MGRUSH training was. I’ve used it, shared it, and need to connect with HR to tell them how useful it was. Multiple people have caught me to say one-on-one what a great success this workshop was, and they credited how I facilitated in particular. The coaching you provided was tremendously helpful and the prep work I did really made a difference.”
Workshop Success: Balance Listening and Reflecting
Effective facilitators do not stand idly while others speak around them. They force content to go through them so they can provide reflection. Visual reflection is frequently more effective than audio-only reflection.
“Managing the flow of conversation (through me) was one of the more successful differences I saw in this workshop. I spent most of my time recording at the flip charts, referencing our posted agenda or objectives, or the takeaways from previous steps. I asked WHY frequently, asked for clarification of terms, and prompted for more detail at various times.”
Workshop Success: Maintaining Control
Never lose control of context. As a process police person, your group depends on you to prevent scope creep. Keep track of progress as it relates to time and work remaining so that you can modulate meeting tempo or cadence.
“Perhaps most telling is that we did not have any conversation hijacking in this workshop! (Sally) did not dominate the conversation. (Frank) did not steer us off course. We did not find ourselves somehow on a tangent or incorrectly focused on in-the-weeds details. When such drifts started, I would remind the group of the high-level focus, take the conversation back to the objectives or the intent of a particular step, and we’d flow back on track quite well.”
Workshop Success: Do Not Facilitate Context
Never ask a group about context, such as “How do you want to make that decision.” They need you for contextual leadership, not for content. Exude confidence around the method you manage and depend on them to fill in with their content.
“One thing in particular worth sharing really stuck for me. When challenged on the agenda or sessions, was my role was clearly to provide the appropriate structure. I do not open up unwieldy options or choices to the workshop participants (such as “which countries would you like to discuss today?” as I was repeatedly asked to do!), but instead framed that in order to meet our objectives for the workshop, we needed to focus on specific areas and decisions. The scope discipline was so helpful, and I really felt the confidence in holding to that because of our training days.”
Workshop Success: Annotated Agenda
Nothing beats a solid, well-scripted annotated agenda. When done well, you should be able to pass your annotation on to someone else to facilitate. Remember, it provides the play script for what to say and do.
“Also helpful were little notes to myself throughout the day, when I would worry I was too quiet that that was actually OK if the conversation was on track and flowing well, or when I’d notice ‘ugh- I just said >I< again!’ It helped to capture responses verbatim (no need to synthesize while facilitating). It was good to be aware of things in a way that was calm and mindful, but not get flustered. My sense is that I have you to thank for your approach and feedback. It was so supportive and constructive in a way that built up my skillset. It didn’t introduce securities or sensitivities around ways to be even stronger. Thank you for that!
Workshop Success: Alumni Resources
Don’t forget the value of the nearly one thousand files and documents you can download with your alumni password. If you lost yours, simply write us for an update.
“I also wanted to pass along the materials used. Your feedback about simple but impactful changes in the presentation–colors, aligning the coding, etc., were great tips. The pages I prepared in advance used the banners and colors more consistently; those items made on the fly (like the competitor sheet) do not reflect the same care.
Workshop Success: Graphic Stimulation
We are confident you remember that a picture is worth a thousand words. Agile has resurrected the value of writing things down and moving them around. Don’t forget that a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures.
“The bubble chart! The attendees responded really well to creating a bubble chart of our priority countries. I posted sticky dots so we could move them around and debate their placement as a whole. The size is reflective of market, and the colors were reflective of regulatory status– emerging, developing, or mature. Good tip on the level of detail to provide in these materials. The bubble chart was easily one of the favorite visuals in the room. Working with large Post-It Notes® is a skillset I am sure will become more second nature with time and practice.”
Workshop Success: Follow the MGRUSH Introductory Sequence
Nothing gives participants greater confidence in their facilitator than a sharp introduction. Follow the seven-step sequence we recommend, even for a fifty-minute meeting.
“I also wrote up the agenda and had a large arrow I moved down the sheet as we progressed. I explained during administrivia that if we needed to dig in on a topic we could, but we’d have to sacrifice time elsewhere. That was valuable during a couple steps.”
Workshop Success: Know Your Deliverable
Always keep the end in mind. Know what DONE looks like. Keep moving the group toward decisions, next steps, and a clear understanding of progress made during your meeting.
“Lastly, our agenda ended the day with a very difficult topic for the leadership team. We planned to assign ownership for discrete country activities. We did not actually get to a place of assigning roles/responsibilities but instead had a much-needed, healthy, and contentious discussion. I did have a RASI breakout session planned, however could not get to that level of assignment. Will be following up with leadership this week to get some movement on those assignments, using that format.
In the end, the CEO, my VP, and I enabled the group to reach high level decisions and it felt great! I’ve really benefitted from your input to date and hope to continue growing. Thank you so very much for helping me improve this talent.
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
______
With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
by Facilitation Expert | Jun 1, 2017 | Meeting Tools, Scrum Events
There are good meetings and there are long meetings but there aren’t many good, long meetings. Therefore, Agile’s Daily Scrum event encourages self-evolving teams to meet daily, yet briefly. Strictly time-boxed to fifteen minutes duration, the Daily Scrum may also be called a morning roll-call, daily huddle, or a daily stand-up. Above all, you can use questions from a Daily Scrum to dramatically improve the quality of your regularly conducted staff meetings.
The Three Questions of a Daily Scrum
Daily Scrum meetings provide team members insight into where each other focuses their activities. For instance, you may use the trivium format of yesterday, today, and tomorrow to modify questions that meet your needs, as illustrated below.
Classic Three Questions of a Daily Scrum (simple variants)
Daily Scrum
- What did you do yesterday? (or, What did I accomplish yesterday?)
- What will you do today? (or, What will I do today?)
- Are there any impediments in your way? (or, What obstacles are impeding my progress?)
Motivational Version of the Three Questions of a Daily Scrum (implication)
- What did you do to change the world yesterday? (or, What did you accomplish since the last meeting?)
- How you are going to crush it today? (or, What are you working on until the next meeting?)
- How you are going to blast through any obstacles unfortunate enough to be standing in your way? (or, What is getting in your way or keeping you from doing your job?)
Comments About a Daily Scrum
Therefore, use the same approach for your weekly or monthly staff meetings. Although not exhaustive, the approach of reporting on Yesterday > Today > Obstacles prevents scope creep. Additionally, standing, rather than sitting, ensures that meetings remain brief and discourages wasted time.
The daily Scrum does not provide the time and place to solve problems. Rather, the daily Scrum approach makes the team aware of its current status. If discussion is needed, a longer meeting with appropriate parties can be arranged. Topics that require additional attention should be deferred until every team member has reported.
Agile’s Daily Scrum strives to disrupt old habits of working separately. Self-organizing teams radically outperform larger, traditionally managed teams. Groups optimally sized from five to nine members who . . .
- Commit to clear, short-term goals
- Gauge overall progress
- Observe each other’s contribution
- Provide each other with unvarnished feedback
Heterogeneous teams outperform homogeneous teams at complex work because they experience more conflict. An engaged team will disagree more frequently, indicating they are normal and healthy. Team performance will be determined by how well the team handles these conflicts.
Remember to have members focus on WHAT they are doing. Discussions about WHY they are doing it should be deferred to a planning meeting. Discussions about HOW they are doing it should be deferred to a design meeting or technical discussion.
For us, WHAT someone does remains abstract while HOW they do it becomes concrete. What we do in our daily lives is to ‘pay bills’. HOW we do that varies, such as writing cheques, submitting cash, etc.
The Nexus Daily Scrum Questions[1]
Using the Nexus framework, multiple development teams focus on the potentially shippable product increment and discuss:
- Was the previous day’s work successfully integrated? If not, why not?
- What new dependencies or impacts have been identified?
- What information needs to be shared across teams in the Nexus?
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[1] 2018 Scrum.org. Offered for license under the Offered for license under the Attribution Share Alike license of Creative Commons, accessible at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode and also described in summary form at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. By utilizing this Nexus Guide, you acknowledge and agree that you have read and agree to be bound by the terms of the Attribution Share-Alike license of Creative Commons.
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.
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With Bookmarks no longer a feature in WordPress, we need to append the following for your benefit and reference
Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
