hi my name is Daria and welcome to scrum master video series will give you practical tips on how
to build awesome teams in the current situation where everybody is working from home people
still trying to figure out well how to do the same things that used to do before when they
were in the office all together but now virtually online a lot of people are not really used to that
and I believe that the role of scrum master in facilitating sprint events and other discussions
became even much more important in this climate now after having conducted different webinars
and classes and workshops online and creating some collaborative say sections within those
classes I would like to share some of my tips and tricks that I believe will help you create
much more productive and engaging discussions and create the same space that you would expect to see
in person but in an online setting let's jump into the tips right away so my tip number one
is spend enough time to prepare the preparation was always ski when we talk about meetings right
if people come into the meeting unprepared they are you don't really know what the meeting is
about or they didn't read the material that was sent to them in advance the meaning most likely
will be very unproductive now in the virtual setting it became even much more important and
especially from the facilitator point of view so if you are preparing for a meeting or any sprint
event whether it's a retrospective or a review or a planning session you need to be prepared
in advance and you need to spend much more time to prepare the material and this might include
thinking about how we're going to facilitate the discussion what kind of techniques you're
going to use what kind of questions you will be asking people or how you will be engaging them
in discussion during that time what kind of time boxes you will need to follow as well as well what
are the general outcomes that you expect from this meeting and most likely you will need to prepare
some material kind of the handouts that you will be given way to people as a reference because it
is much more difficult to follow a meeting without any reference material when you're not even in the
same room tip number two SEC working agreements up front the discussion might become very
unproductive very quickly if you do not set the right expectations up front especially around what
kind of behaviors do you expect from people in those meetings especially in the virtual setting
when you might not be able to see people or people have different working conditions in the setting
so one of the most important thing that you should discussed right away is the fact that if people
are attending the meeting they need to be 100% engaged in this particular meeting it means that
they cannot check their emails they cannot write some other messages in chat to someone else who is
not in the meeting and sure not even people who are in the meeting because that would be a side
conversation that read detracts from the outcome of the meeting we are working on together they
cannot talk with anyone who is maybe around them at her and the house they should be 100% focused
on meeting and it is very important to set this expectation right at the beginning with your
team and it might sound harsh and people might feel uncomfortable saying that well I can do
some other work right try to turn it back to you well if we were sitting together in the same room
in person in this meeting what would you think of someone else someone from your team was working on
something or saying it's on an email you would know that they're not listening so if you're
in the meeting and you ask a question and no one replies or someone says oh excuse me I didn't hear
it well most likely you were just not listening right and if this is the case why are we even in
this meeting together maybe you shouldn't be in this meeting right and I think that's one of the
most important things to discuss and definitely hold each other accountable for this rule this
has to be a rule within your team when you have any kind of meetings or sprint events now the
other rule that I think is important to discuss is Cameron I believe that having a camera and
having everyone on camera if possible is a must first of all you're already not in the same room
so you can't see each other right so you can't create this connection and also you cannot read
body language I can't even tell you numerous a lot of times where I was in video conference and
I could see someone talking to the camera but I couldn't hear them or I just could see that they
had a question so I could call out to them and say hey I see you have a question why don't you
ask this question and without having this visual contact without having a camera you can't do that
so you miss on a lot of important discussions at this point leaving the last thing to kind of talk
about with your team if obviously if you're not speaking put yourself on mute and ideally try to
find a space in your house but it's the Clarks quietest right so don't sit in the kitchen if
your family's having lunch try to find a quiet spot where you can really focus on the meeting
100% maybe there are some other rules that you would implement in your team but definitely talk
about some working agreements before you start your virtual meetings in general and tip number
three is to create a collaborative space to keep engagement pretty high you need to create
a collaborative space for people to contribute their ideas during the sprint event or any other
meetings that you have and it means that you need to engage the participants into asking questions
or providing feedback as much as possible and ideally you would want to use different tools that
can facilitate and make it very easy to do I was not every company can use different tools so you
need to be creative and maybe use chat window in your local software to encourage people to really
contribute not just listening if people are just listening in considering that right now we have
so much more meaning so many more meetings that we have to attend just because you are not sitting in
the same place in the same office if you're just listening in well and especially if you're working
on something else you might as well just work on something else because you don't really listen
in this case if you if you do create a meaning to create an event think about how you're going
to engage people and how you're going to ask them for their feedback obviously if you think
about Sprint retrospective it's very easy that's the whole point is to collect people's ideas and
thoughts and discuss so everybody in the Sprint retrospective contributes and that's expected but
what about meetings like sprint planning will sprint review especially sprint review where
the team might be presenting some features to stakeholders and if you have stakeholders in the
sprint review and you should have think about how you gonna engage them maybe you can ask them to
submit questions during the team presentation so that you can ask them at the end maybe you
have a survey that you would like them to fill in during the sprint review so that you can collect
their feedback so think about the ways how you can engage the stakeholders in this meaning so
that they're not just listening in because that's not a very engaging way for you to gather their
feedback now for sprint planning there are also different ways that you can engage the team maybe
engage them into creating the Sprint goal together in estimation maybe voting on what kind of items
they need to bring into the Sprint backlog so there are many different ways how you can do
that and whenever you're prepared for your screen to bring your sprint event or any other kneading
think about how you're going to engage every single participant and tip number four write it
down sometimes connection might break or there might be some issues with audio or video and
people attending your meeting might not understand what you were saying or not hear it properly even
if they're listening so it's best to write it down as much as possible so if you know they're
going to ask a question during the medium or you know that you will ask people to contributor a
specific topic make sure that you have it written down somewhere so that you can share slides or
you can share your screen and give people this visual contact with the information because a
lot of us are more visual and it's more difficult to capture information or understand information
just by listening to it especially when we're in the virtual setting so think about how you're
going to collect all this information as well as the outcomes of the meeting once again because of
the connection because it's in a virtual setting sometimes we might misunderstand each other we
might misinterpret the information that is being given to us making sure that you have the outcomes
of the meeting somehow captured whoever it is who is capturing it however you want to collect
this information think about how are you going to make it visible and break them down through
people to refer to during the meeting as well as after it and tip number five is keep it small it
will be great if we can invite everyone for one hour meeting and solve all our problems during
that one hour with everyone involved and everyone contributing however it is not really productive
and if you have too many people in the meeting well most likely most of those people will not
be able to contribute right especially in the virtual setting it might be easier in in-person
setting where we can split them up so think about the really the people who need to be there and
those people now the ideal you would want to have maybe eight ten people maximum if you want for
everyone in the group to contribute or maybe just say something and if you want to really
have a very engaging discussion and get some real really encourage people to speak up two to three
people groups are the best and obviously if you just want people to contribute their ideas but do
you not don't necessarily expect them to speak up on all the ideas they contribute it then you can
have a bigger setting and you can use different collaboration tools to do that but there are some
tools that you can use to break people into smaller groups to allow for those discussions
to happen so depending basically on what is the outcome that you are expected from your meeting
you might think about how many people you want to have that in this meeting so that you can see how
you can engage them and how much contribution from them you want in during that meeting so here are
some tips and tricks that I want you to share with you around how to better facilitate your
virtual meetings as a scrum master as well as some of the tools that I've seen useful that you can
also use in your virtual settings whether it's a workshop a sprint planning or its sprint review
or retrospective and if you want to learn more I will be running various events virtual events
for scrum masters as well as different workshops and classes so I do encourage you to go to scrum
master comm and check out what is available join me for some of the future classes that
will be very happy to see you and you will be able to see what kind of tools I use and learn
to use and see them in action and I think it will be very helpful for you if you're looking
for something like that to really enable you create engaging discussions during the meetings
so I hope that it was very helpful for you and I hope to see you next time Cheers and grandma