At most companies, there seems to be a never-ending supply of meetings to attend, and complaining about their sheer volume is popular water-cooler conversation. We may not be able to reduce the number of meetings, but can we make them more effective (and thus, shorter)? Certainly!

For example, many people still start and end their meetings on the hour. This ensures that the people in the meeting have to wait for everyone who had a previous meeting that ended on the hour to arrive. And if that meeting slopped over its end time by a few minutes, the delay is even more. If you start your meetings five minutes after the hour and end them five minutes before the hour, it gives people time to get from one conference room to another, and maybe even stop for a coffee or a bathroom break.

And about meetings that go over their scheduled time: When you do that, you are taking time that does not belong to you. It may be convenient for you to extend the meeting on-the-fly, but if the attendees have subsequent meetings that you are making them late for, you are wasting the time of the people in those meetings, which is terribly rude. On top of that, Agile development is all about delivering on time. If we can't even bring a meeting in on time, how can we hope to deliver software on time?

Another example: Many Scrum teams use what Mike Cohn calls commitment-driven iteration planning. (Agile Estimating and Planning, p158). The team first figures out the number of hours available in the sprint, based on the percentage of their time they expect to be able to spend on stories and any days off that team members have. Then they take stories one at a time, break them into tasks, estimate how long each task will take, and subtract the time from the available hours. They continue to do this until they run out of hours. At that point, their sprint is loaded.

I have been in sprint planning meetings where figuring out the days off can take 15 to 20 minutes. The team goes around the table, with each team member saying something like "OK, I was going to take a few days off, maybe this sprint, or maybe in July. Or maybe I could take them in April." Eventually, after a two- or three-minute monologue, the team member figures out how may days he or she is going to be out during the sprint. Then they move on to the next person.

It doesn't have to be this way. They all know that they are going to be asked about days off in the sprint; this happens every planning meeting. Couldn't they figure this out in advance, rather than making everyone sit around twiddling their thumbs while they muse about when it would be good to take vacation? In some cases, there are coverage issues. This can be handled by announcing in the daily standup that you would like to take some time off in the next sprint, and if there is a problem, working it out before the planning meeting.

And in spite of all that has been written in the literature about not keeping a room full of people waiting while a poor typist updates a story in the sprint-tracking tool, we are still doing it regularly. Write it down and do it later!

I have seen lots of stories in the Agile tracking tool that refer to issues in the problem tracking system, or to documents in documentation repositories. It is frequently possible to get a URL for these issues or documents, and this should be put in the story, rather than just saying "Issue 12345" or "the code spec is in the repository under this project". If you make people search for information that you must of had a link to at the time you were looking at it, you waste the time of everyone who has to look at your story.

Wasting people's time in meetings isn't just rude; it severely impacts the flow of the meeting. While you are searching through the document repository to try to find the referenced code specification, the rest of the team starts checking their phone for messages, or talking about last night's ballgame, or they decide this would be a good time to get a coffee or take a bathroom break. It may take you five or ten minutes to get the meeting back on track.

It is easy to gripe about meetings, but it is not much harder to make them a lot less wasteful, which will go a long way towards making them less irritating.