Who is Responsible for Events in Agile?

There are five major events in Agile Scrum: release planning, sprint planning, daily standup, product demo, and retrospectives. The Uncommon League’s Practical Agile utilizes a 6th secret event for backlog refinement by assessing technical risk, prioritization, t-shirt size (s-m-l-xl) estimating, and story splitting for backlog items.

All of these events are for the Team, not a specific role. When the Team participates in all these events so together, they get a 360-degree point of view and varying perspectives needed to complete the event with higher quality outputs.

For this reason, events are not done by a single person or the select few in a silo. Team members can get frustrated with events taking too much time and not being facilitated well. This frustration can lead the Team to think these events can be skipped to focus on development. 

Of course, the Product Owner and Business Analyst have been creating the vision, product roadmap, and story map outside of these events with minimum team member involvement. The Product Owner is helping the Team to make decisions needed during these events.

The Scrum Master as a team facilitator will make sure these events are performed and are performed in as little time as possible. The Scrum Master also focuses on ensuring the outcomes of these events are put into action. Example: user stories moved from the backlog into the sprint are in the sprint backlog, and that those user stories meet the criteria needed to be considered ready for development in the sprint (Definition of Ready, Acceptance Criteria, Definition of Done, etc.)

The Team as a whole holds the responsibility for events. There isn’t a single person on the Team responsible for an event. This differs from Waterfall approaches, where the Project Manager is often in a command and control position with responsibility for key tasks.