How to Run Meetings on AlanIsWright.com

Trumpet time: a great way to kick off a remote-first all-team meeting

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:36:28 +0000

In 2021, I wrote a blog post on running effective show & tells. If I were writing that blog post again today, the first thing I would add would be kick off the event with trumpet time.

Trumpet time. How we kick off our weekly team show & tells at Climate Policy Radar

How to run a daily stand-up

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:48:57 +0000

If you have ever worked with a software or agile team before, you have probably done a daily stand-up. In this blog post, I share my thoughts on why daily stand-ups are useful and some tips on how to run them well.

About stand-ups

What is a stand-up?

Stand-ups are regular meetings for the team to synchronise. They are usually

held daily
last 15 minutes or less (the idea behind standing up is that the lack of a chair encourages people to be brief.)
combined with less regular meetings such as planning, retrospectives and show & tells

You might have called this the ‘daily scrum’ if you’re working with the scrum methodology.

Team manual and team charter – my two favourite workshops to run with new teams or teams with new members

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 18:47:00 +0000

When a new team is formed or an existing team goes through change, it is important to take some time for team members to learn more about who each other are and how best to work together. In this post, I summarise my two favourite workshops to help teams get off to a good start: team manual and team charter.

Team Manual

I first learnt about the team manual exercise from Emily Webber, who I worked with at the Land Registry.

How to run a retrospective

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 14:41:51 +0000

This post provides an introduction to team retrospectives and a guide on how to run them.

Intro to retrospectives

What is a retrospective?

A regular meeting for the team to reflect on past performance and identify ways to improve.

Why bother?

Good teams continuously improve their product. Great teams also continuously improve how they work together as a team.

Retrospectives help teams:

Identify actionable ways to improve
Make continuous improvement a habit
Take collective ownership of their processes and ways of working
Recognise each other’s achievements
Celebrate good performance

Good retrospectives are:

How to run a premortem

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:09:00 +0000

Premortems help us identify and reduce risks before they happen. They are a great exercise to run before launching a product or feature.

What is a premortem

Product teams often use postmortems to understand what caused a problem and how to reduce the risk of it becoming a problem again. Premortems are the opposite. You do them at the beginning instead of the end, and you plan how to stop the worst from happening rather than try to understand why it happened.

Makers time and collaboration time: two metrics that help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 12:15:25 +0000

Makers time and collaboration time are two metrics that I have started using to help teams to measure the amount of quality time they have available to do their best work, and to make improvements over time. In this blog post I explain what they are and when/how to use them.

Better meetings for remote teams

Wed, 12 May 2021 16:32:07 +0000

“Too many meetings” is something I’ve said or heard over and over again in every organisation I’ve worked. Since lockdown began, this problem seems to have gotten worse for two main reasons:

There are more meetings: ‘Watercooler’ conversations and informal chats around the team space have been replaced with scheduled video meetings.
Meetings are more stressful: Video meetings seem to drain energy more than face to face meetings

My team have been experimenting with ways to make our meetings work better for us over the past few months. Below is what we’ve found has worked for us:

Running effective show & tells

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 16:13:54 +0000

Show & tell is a chance for teams to show their work to stakeholders and to get feedback. It’s a crucial form of governance for agile teams that keeps everyone up to date by allowing them to see the team’s progress firsthand.

Before you read this, you might want to check out my other blog post on how I distinguish between show & tells, sprint reviews and showcases so that we’re speaking the same language.

In this blog post, I’ll share some tips on running effective show & tells.

Show & tells, sprint reviews and showcases – what’s the difference?

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 05:50:00 +0000

I was recently asked to share some best practice on running effective show and tells. This led me into a semantic rabbit hole on the differences between show & tells, sprint reviews, team reviews, end of iteration reviews, sprint demos and showcases. These words are often used interchangeably to describe similar things. In this post, I’ll explain what some of these terms mean to me.