Focus on purpose
Ensure that everyone in the team and organization understands the purpose of each ceremony. For example, why do we conduct sprint planning? What is the goal of PI planning? By keeping the focus on purpose, the team can understand how these activities contribute to creating value and delivering results.
Detailed descriptions of how the different ceremonies should be conducted and why they should be held can be found on the SAFe website, scaledagileframework.com, but it may not always be clear how you should organize them in your organization and what concrete outcomes you expect to achieve.
One way to clarify both how and what is to concretize everything, directly linking it to different aspects that your team is working on. The same applies to the ten SAFe principles. For example, what does "Apply systems thinking" mean for your specific team and how you work?
Ensure that everyone in the team has a clear understanding of why you do things, what they should lead to, and how they should be carried out. Many tend to zoom out and do other things during, for example, a PI planning, but if you explain why it is such an important ceremony and the importance of everyone's participation in the planning, it becomes easier to get everyone involved.
A strong argument to use is that what you discuss during a PI planning is what you promise to deliver during the next increment. If everyone is involved, it's also easier to react if the workload becomes too heavy.
Evaluate
After each ceremony, evaluate its effectiveness. Be honest with yourselves and ask whether the ceremony truly helped achieve the desired results and whether there were any unnecessary elements or time wastage. If something doesn't work, be brave enough to adapt and improve the ceremony to make it more productive. This aligns with working with continuous improvements and always considering if there's a different way to do things.
Dare to question things. Another tip is to document experiences along the way, so you don't forget when it's time to evaluate.
Also, remember to continue with ongoing evaluations. It's not a one-time event but should be part of the ongoing work as a natural component. The organization's needs and challenges may change, and it's important to adapt the ceremonies accordingly to continue providing value.
A classic mistake is conducting evaluations just for the sake of evaluation, but then not addressing the issues that arise. This leads team members to question why they should engage in evaluations if nothing is done about the findings. So be diligent in documenting everything that emerges during a retrospective or evaluation, and together with the team, select a few concrete things to work on or address during the upcoming sprint or increment.
Planning and actions
Ensure that each ceremony results in concrete plans and actions. For example, after PI planning, there should be clear PI objectives, measurable metrics, and a shared understanding of the actions to be taken to achieve those objectives. Avoid making ceremonies mere "meetings for the sake of meetings" without tangible outcomes.
Since you have already clarified the purpose of a particular ceremony or activity, it's also essential to check whether you truly achieved what you intended. Of course, the team may accomplish things that didn't exactly align with the original plan due to changing circumstances and conditions, but even then, it's crucial to evaluate why it turned out that way.
For instance, if you use Jira as a tool to manage your stories and product backlog, it's straightforward at the end of the sprint to generate a list of everything that has been added and removed during the sprint. Make it a habit to document why things have been added or removed, and the team will get better at planning both sprints and increments.
Balance between ceremonies and work
Ensure a good balance between ceremonies, meetings, etc., and the actual work. Spending too much time on ceremonies can divert focus from what truly matters most – delivering value to customers. Be meticulous in timeboxing meetings and ceremonies and stick to those times. Sometimes you might need to go down to the level of agenda items.
For example, it might not be enough to time-limit the entire meeting to 40 minutes; you might need to set a specific duration for each agenda item. So, for instance, the introduction may take a maximum of three minutes, the story review 15 minutes, feedback and comments 15 minutes, and so on. If this is a recurring meeting with a standard agenda, you can easily adjust the timeboxing based on typical patterns. Identify which items take longer and which go faster.
By organizing and timeboxing ceremonies and meetings, you also know how much time you have available to work on delivering value and improving the product. Another smart thing you can introduce is that team members can be available as needed but not necessarily have to attend the entire meeting. This way, you free up valuable time for team members to focus on delivering value. At the same time, it's essential that they don't fill this time with other tasks but remain available for any questions that may arise if needed.
By maintaining focus on results and value, and being flexible enough to adapt ceremonies to suit the organization's needs, you can avoid getting stuck in too much theorizing and instead create a culture of concrete delivery and progress. This will contribute to a more efficient and successful agile work environment focused on meeting customer needs and delivering high-quality results.
Now that we have gone through how to adapt ceremonies to your unique circumstances, we will address how to manage the balance between new development and maintenance in the next article.
