A team meeting lasts for at least two hours and consists of five steps:

Preparation. Many people, especially executives, come to the meeting at the last minute and unprepared.

Lombardi Time helps to deal with it effectively. Vince Lombardi believed that to be on time for a meeting is to arrive 15 minutes before the meeting starts so that you have time to prepare. Showing up later is being late. During the preparation time it is worthwhile to:

Analyse the past:

• Check the stories that have been completed. This involves making sure that value is actually delivered. It is important to realise that story completion is actually a person's suggestion: the team may convince the person that the story is not actually completed. This behaviour of the team is a good indicator.
• Analyse the sprint and think about what went well and what went poorly.

When gathered in one room people tend to discuss fishing and children, so it is worth making a rule: only chat with colleagues if you need to clarify any do's and don'ts.

Think about the meeting:

• What news would you like to share with the whole team?
• What metrics would you like to show?
• What would you like to bring up for discussion or AAR?

What to do next. Although the world is unpredictable, everyone has an 80% understanding of what next steps they would like to take:

• Plan your personal next steps for the next sprint.
• What stories should the team take to the sprint?

Keep in mind that this is not yet a plan, just a suggestion.

A Check-In is a brief story of a person's past sprint. Such a short story, even though it contains personal stuff, actually sets the mood.

Follow the rules:

• You can only talk about yourself.
• You cannot interrupt the person, but after the person has finished, you can ask a clarifying question or show your support. Let's say an employee has had a baby or a relative has died and the employee has decided to talk about it. Support the colleague, offer congratulations or regrets.
• Do not give advice. This is an important rule: unsolicited advice is annoying and destroys the atmosphere of trust. This is generally a good mental model for life ‘Do not give people advice unless you have been asked for it’.
• Do not start discussions. Only clarifying questions and encouragement.

To start a Check-In, ask the team who would like to start. The person who starts first, after they have finished, passes the floor to the next person of their choice until everyone has spoken.

Everyone must be sure to speak. If something very bad has happened in a person's life, so bad that ерун cannot participate in the work process, that person should take a break and not come to work meetings or to work.

Data Evaluation. In this phase, the team synchronises on work issues, compares the desired state and the planned state and selects topics for further discussion.

The Scope discussion takes place first:

• A team member tells the state of the story taken in the sprint in no more than 45 seconds. If a person wants to tell something additional, it is entered into the synchronisation. If several participants were involved in the story, they can comment on the words of a colleague.
• The status of the story is defined: Done, Not Done or Drop. Drop refers to those stories whose execution has lost relevance. Often people tend to rate a Not Done as a Drop. Make sure that it is the stories that have lost relevance that go into Drop. This should happen rarely.
• Add is discussed. Add are tasks that team members did not plan for, but were forced to do because these tasks turned out to be blocking or urgent. If your team has a rule that every task that qualifies as an Add results in a sprint interruption, you will not have this column.
• Extra is discussed. Extra is something that the team was not planning to do, but because the team completed the sprint at 100% and had free resources, they decided to do something extra. Extra can be spawned by the fact that there was a Drop.
• The team looks at Sprint Quality.

After, the team looks at other metrics that spawn topics for AAR or decision making.

After that comes synchronisation, where people discuss news that is important to the whole team. It is important not to discuss solutions during the synchronisation phase: if a solution needs to be developed, that issue is brought to Improvements.

Improvements. The team should already have an Agenda for this stage from the previous stages: what the team would like to bring to the AAR and what decisions the team would like to make at this meeting.

It is important to choose from the topics proposed for Improvements only the most important ones and only those that can be realistically dealt with during the meeting. The rest should either be ignored or scheduled for a sprint.

Planning. Sprint planning takes place at this stage. The meeting ends when people have discussed the Action Items for the sprint, their dependencies and agreed that this scope can be completed in one sprint; all stories have been estimated and the sum has been calculated.