APPLYING CADENCE IN SCRUM: PART 1 OF 3

By Aaron G. Tucker, M.Ed, SPC

When it comes to SAFe and Agile ceremonies, most of them come from SCRUM. There have been great resources created to help you understand the intent behind the ceremonies, and others to help you understand some of the structural best practices, but I often find scrum masters and teams need encouragement to apply cadence to their ceremonies, as they may not see or understand the benefits.

Too often, teams are continuously changing and updating the ceremonies, days, time, longevity, and agenda. While Agile encourages us to be flexible, I am not sure there is much benefit in the randomness of a poorly executed schedule. So, I challenge Scrum Masters to look at why we would want to apply cadence to these ceremonies, some of the challenges this will help them overcome, and the best practices in preparing for and planning them.

This is part one of three of a deeper dive into those best practices to help you understand why I encourage such a cadence.

• Scheduling conflicts when ceremonies are added late i.e. Can’t get the whole team there because their calendars are now full.
• Last minute reschedules due to competing meetings i.e. Leadership and other meetings aren’t scheduled around the cadence.
• Last minute scheduling or rescheduling causing competing time priorities i.e. Completing work commitments vs attending a ceremony
• Time management challenges for team members e.g. Team members may not have planned for unscheduled ceremonies and allotted enough time to their competing tasks.
• Missed meetings are more frequent i.e. Team members can’t schedule around their ceremonies that aren’t on cadence. e.g. Team members have an excuse for not attending as they attend other meetings or have “higher priority” work.
• Collective Ownership of ceremonial success is greatly deteriorated i.e. Full Team member attendance is infrequent due to conflicts causing repetition of conversations and communications rather than a collective discussion. Reliance on catching up and team members follow-up causes challenges.
• …And more

Start and End Dates of Sprints

While this seems relatively straightforward, the need to properly think through when your teams start and end each sprint can have serious implications. One would think, and many do, that a simple Monday through Friday iteration keeps things simple and more manageable, however, this shortsightedness often results in greater challenges in execution brought on by missed ceremonies.

Fortunately, in the United States and many other countries throughout the world, corporations have adopted a holiday schedule that provides their employees “long weekends”. While nobody in the history of man has ever complained about a long weekend, they are not without their complications. Too often we do not factor these long weekends into our planning proposals and sometimes discover too late the challenges they have now bound us to.

As you will see by the recommendations to come, most sprint ceremonies should occur at the end of a sprint. If the sprint occurs on a typical workweek basis – Monday through Friday – then most of your ceremonies will occur on a Friday. However, because we have 10 federal holidays (and many other religious holidays that may/may not be celebrated), most of which are observed or fall on Thursday -Sunday, many companies will provide the long weekend beginning on Friday.

With so many holidays and long weekends beginning on Friday, we will need to move a significant number of meetings. While this seems easy enough, it disrupts the cadence, requires more regular adjustments to the calendar, and causes additional overhead in the form of time spent rescheduling. Furthermore, in my experience, those responsible for scheduling are not always that forward thinking that they remember to move those ceremonies early enough that scheduling is easy (everyone’s calendars are not already filled). Unfortunately, finding a time late is a significant challenge and often a reason given for cancelling the ceremony altogether.

Starting and ending your sprints midweek relieves these concerns almost entirely. I recommend a Wednesday-Tuesday cadence as this also ensures those Thursday holidays are accounted for.

Cadence through Recurring Meetings

Outlook makes it quite simple for Scrum Masters, RTEs, and Product Owners to schedule ceremonies in a way that is on cadence. Using the “Recurrence” feature in Outlook you can schedule ceremonies indefinitely (provided your organization doesn’t impose restrictions) and get them on a cadence that provides everyone the opportunity to plan around them.

In a truly agile organization, everyone throughout the organization will respect the agile ceremonies. While this is not always possible, and higher priority meetings will always occur, having your meetings on a “set it and forget it” cadence will begin to resonate across the organization. Using many of the best practices described here your organization will discover the best times within a typical workweek to schedule All Hands meetings and others and not impede progress of the teams. As any agile organization will tell you, “we are all in this together” and must have collective ownership of delivery. Anything that impedes that (such as excessive or conflicting meetings) should be minimized.

Avoid Conflicts

Share your ceremonial calendar with everyone. Provide transparency and visibility into your ceremonial cadence and have conversations with leadership and other stakeholders to help build some structure into your calendar. When everyone knows when your ceremonies are and have agreed to work around it as much as possible, other meetings can be scheduled to avoid creating competing priorities.

Work Around Schedules as Necessary

Sometimes within our teams we have unique or special cases for scheduling. We likely have team members who have families with children but may also have individuals who have negotiated special hours due to special cases within their own lives or families. While uncommon it does happen.

In such cases it is important to accommodate these schedules the best you can. We cannot simply expect that our team members are going to ignore their personal obligations but at the same time there needs to be some sense of commitment to the businesses needs. Try to accommodate the best you can. If someone cannot start work until 10am due to a late starting preschool, then have the DSU at 10:15. If another has negotiated a 4x10hr schedule, plan your ceremonies to accommodate, but negotiate with them on the day if necessary.

Additionally, we expect that everyone will work around the schedules we set. Once we get things on cadence, we do not want or expect that we will have to shift them every iteration; the expectation is in fact that they will work around them. Once we have gotten collective agreement from the team that these times will work and have added them to our working agreements, we should also add the expectation for everyone to schedule all other meetings around them, though there may be exceptions.

Summary 

In most cases you will find scheduling a challenge. You will need to negotiate with the attendees to make the ceremonies and other meetings accommodating while minimizing the task switching and competing priorities that non-cadence-based scheduling always entails.  Do your best, become increasingly organized and flexible, and everything will work itself out in the end.

Read Part 2 of 3 of this series “Scheduling Best Practices for Team Ceremonies” here.