Iteration Meeting

Ever known a project where the team believes that they are doing well, but senior management believe it is off track? This happens quite often, and usually a communication breakdown on any number of levels. Mismatched expectations (“I thought we were getting Feature X this week?”), priorities disconnect (“Why are we getting Feature Y? Feature X is so much more important?”), senior management and product manager on a different page (senior manager says “That’s not how Feature X is supposed to look!” although the developer built it to the business analyst’s satisfaction), etc. can result when communication lines aren’t working properly. There are a few ways to address this, and the Iteration Meeting is one of the best places to start.

Iteration meeting attendees should include the entire project team. You should also invite the project sponsor, serious requirements contributors such as product managers, and any other customer in an important stakeholder role.

Here is a sample iteration presentation for your reference. If you can’t access this link or would like a soft copy, contact me at aaronhsmith@gmail.com and I’d be happy to email it.

Here are some of the exercises that I usually include in the iteration meeting:

• Start with something fun – No, I’m not talking about a Trust Fall exercise. Maybe a comic or, if your group isn't too formal, a funny video clip such as the “More Cowbell” SNL skit. As people filter into the meeting they laugh, which keeps things loose.
  
• Iteration review – Review the team’s accomplishments, especially highlighting significant “above and beyond” efforts. If your team is small and doesn’t have many stories then refer to the stories in the presentation. However, if you are dealing with lots of stories, you’ll want to stick with the high-level features that were worked on, then refer to your story board or project tracking tool for story-level details. You should move very quickly through the stats and spend the bulk of the time on having developers demo their newly completed work, story by story if possible.
  
• Reflection – This is a mini-post mortem that you should do at each iteration meeting, if possible. Discuss what practices to keep doing, to stop doing, and to start doing. Doing this regularly will lead to an ever-improving team that is increasingly effective.
• Iteration Plan – By the time we hit this meeting, I like to have the planning done. At this point, we are communicating what the team will be doing over the coming iteration. We also discuss the Bench, which is a bucket of “developer-ready” stories that we will start if a developer completes their iteration assignments early. You can read more on iteration planning here.
  

There are millions of ways to run your iteration meeting, so find what works best for you.

Benefits of the iteration meeting

• 
  Stakeholder alignment – Bringing the stakeholders into a room every few weeks, starting early in the project, helps ensure that management, the business, and the project team stay aligned and that course correction happens early and regularly throughout the project.
• Less politics – Projects where the communication is not adequate can spend half their time explaining perceived failures, providing spur-of-the-moment status reports and preparing unscheduled demos, etc. This is senior management’s way of saying that communication is lacking. Inviting stakeholders to the iteration meeting facilitates this communication. Once senior management feel confident that they are being heard and see first hand that the project team is nailing their deliverables and have sound plans for addressing issues, trust goes up. Consequently, senior management are able to re-direct their energies to more pressing fires. The project team can then focus on delivery with the confidence that the customer is on board with what they are doing.
• Team focus – When the team knows that their work will be acknowledged and scrutinized at each iteration meeting, they maintain focus to ensure both the quality and quantity of their contribution. Ensure that team members and customers keep the meeting constructive and positive. If someone doesn’t deliver for an iteration, believe me, they beat themselves up enough as it is; you can discuss their performance off-line in a one-on-one. Focus on giving credit where credit is due for a job well done, highlighting the story behind the stats, such as roadblocks and challenges overcome to provide a quality product.

Tweak the format of your iteration meeting until you have something that works for you. If your team starts getting where the customer is coming from and feel appreciated for their efforts, and if the customer perceives that they are being heard and are getting significant value for their investment, then the value of the iteration meeting is self-evident, and the hour spent was justified.