Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on conducting a scrum stand-up meeting in English.
Not everyone likes meetings, and for good reason. Many meetings are poorly organized and poorly run. But meetings are a necessary part of work and business, especially in project management. For this reason, it’s important that we find ways to have good meetings.
If you’ve worked in software development, especially agile environments, you’ll know about one excellent kind of meeting called a scrum or stand-up meeting. Scrum is an approach to software development that uses cross-functional teams. Each day, the team has a short stand-up meeting where people update others on progress, plans, and challenges.
Whether or not you work in software development, leading a scrum style meeting is a useful experience. You’ll have to do many things that apply to all good meetings. For example, you’ll need to open the meeting and ask for updates. You may also find the chance to suggest collaboration between team members. And the person running the meeting is also responsible for putting aside, or sidebarring, issues that can be discussed after the meeting. These are all techniques that can help you in any kind of meeting, whether you work with scrum or not.
In today’s dialog, we’ll hear Jill, a project manager and scrum master, leading a daily scrum meeting. We’ll also hear two team members, Katherine and Sam. Sam will be first to provide his updates. And, as you’ll hear, Jill will help keep the team focused.
Listening Questions
1. When she opens the meeting, what does Jill suggest they do to stay focused?
2. When Sam says what he is going to do today, what does Jill suggest?
3. What issue does Jill want to “sidebar,” or leave for after the meeting?
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