So many meetings

Wow, so after getting agreement from the scrum teams, the meeting requests started to flood in.

For a while now, my calendar has been pretty quiet. I made the mistake of withdrawing from many meetings because whilst the Tech Comms team was working to a waterfall method, and everyone else was scrumming it, we were getting information we wouldn't be using for weeks. It all seemed rather pointless.

Now, of course, we need to be in the thick of it. So, I've received invitations for planning meetings, review meetings, retrospectives, daily stand-ups etc. My calendar suddenly looks a lot fuller. That's going to take some getting used to.

The first big day of meetings was yesterday. We had:

• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective
• 2 planning meetings

That pretty much wiped out my calendar for the rest of the day. But how useful was it?

The sprint review highlighted stuff I'd missed out on by not working in the previous sprint. It gave me some detail, and I know the people I need to talk to about the work.

The retrospective was OK, and generally constructive. Rather than give everyone a load of post it notes and ask what worked well, we went through the teams' list of unwritten rules and asked whether we were doing these. I thought that provided a good framework for the meeting and kept it brief and good natured.

The planning meetings - well, never having been to a planning meeting I didn't know what to expect. I had a list of stories I wanted to get added into the sprint, and was doing my best to work out which of the existing stories might need some content adding. I had been worrying a bit about this, but there was no need. It was obvious which stories needed content writing. For each of those stories, I got these 3 tasks added:

• Write UA content
• Review UA content
• Update UA content

The Review UA content task was important as I now know who will be reviewing the content for this work, and it needs doing in order for the team to claim the storypoints.

Although yesterday felt like a bit of a slog, I feel like we've made some great first steps.

1. Tech Comms is now included within the sprint. This will help people see it as part of the product.
2. The team have some understanding of what I'll be doing for the project.
3. I know who to speak to about each piece of work. This used to be a bit of a problem.
4. Review tasks will need to happen before the story is done.

And another bonus is that I don't need to keep a separate task list for this work at the moment. I have a good idea of what I'm doing for the project for the next two weeks.