Have you ever wondered what a great kick-off for a new Scrum Team looks like? This article is part of the series on “How to kick-off an amazing Scrum Team“. The complete Practical Guide includes the following steps:
- Invite for a Kick-Off Meeting
- Socialize
- Explain the theory behind “Agile”
- Clarify roles
- Find slots for regular Meetings
- Discuss Tooling requirements
- Agree on Estimation processes & Metrics
- Create your Definition of Done
- Conduct a Refinement Session
Invite for a Scrum Team Kick-Off Meeting
Purpose
By inviting people to a Kick-Off Meeting, you set a starting point for your team. Also, the Kick-Off Meeting gives the team space to self-organize. Furthermore, they can clarify how they want to work together as a team. As a result, they will have a frame for the upcoming collaboration. That frame will help them in their self-organization. Your team needs to know when it started working as a Scrum Team. Moreover, they need time to organize themselves in order to align expectations. If this step is missing, you already set yourself up for several issues that might come up:
- people are working on other teams in parallel or have other distractions. Because they thought this team hasn’t really started their collaboration yet
- team members will have deviating expectations when it comes to their collaboration. Because they had no opportunity to explicitly talk about it. As a result, misunderstandings and conflicts will arise
- the team will waste a couple of weeks until they finally settle ambiguities. Instead, you could invest a couple of hours once at the very beginning of their collaboration
Actions
Who to invite to your Scrum Team Kick-Off
Sending out an invitation for a Kick-Off Meeting is in itself a simple task. But it requires a bit of preparation. You need to know who to invite and make sure to organize all the required facilities for your meeting. Invitees should include at least the Scrum Team, but it might be beneficial to also invite other Stakeholders as needed. Then again, avoid having too many participants. Having a lot of participants in one meeting drastically increases the required skill to facilitate the session. Even more important, it typically decreases the engagement of each individual and makes it less likely for introverts to be included. Just make sure, that your Kick-Off meeting remains a Scrum Team Event to self-organize. Especially, prevent Stakeholders from hijacking your Kick-Off Meeting.
When to invite for your Scrum Team Kick-Off
Also, you need to know when to invite and might want to share an Agenda with your invitees in advance. Make sure to set aside at least half a day for the Kick-Off Meeting. I recommend a full day with a complementary team dinner by the end of the day. Choose a timeslot where everybody in your team can fully participate. The Kick-Off Meeting is a mandatory meeting for the whole Scrum Team. If not everybody can attend the full meeting, find another time slot. Otherwise, you waste everybody’s time because you just create alignment in a subgroup of your Scrum Team. Of course, this is would not be sufficient to fulfill the purpose of the Kick-Off Meeting. In addition to that, you might even create a boundary within your team before your team has even started working together.
Equally important, you want to have your Kick-off meeting as soon as possible. Because every day you are waiting for the Kick-Off to happen is basically a day lost for product development. Therefore, you might want to include management and make this meeting a priority. There is really nothing to be more important than getting this team started. If you struggle with getting this priority, you might already face your very first impediment right here. Thus, you might want to investigate, why there is a lack of commitment to have an appropriate start for your team. A valuable resource for this investigation might be the “Five Dysfunctions” Model from Patrick Lencioni.
Key Takeaways
- Find the sweet spot to include the most important, but not every Stakeholder to your Kick-Off Meeting
- Check, that every invitee can participate in the full meeting
- Make this meeting a priority and investigate if a lack of commitment is arising already as an impediment
