AGILE How do you know your Daily Standup is Effective

We are living in the age of uncertainty and for those who change things are bound to be exponential Dr. M. B. Athreya Management Guru

Daily Standup Meetings in Agile are an effective tool in implementing timebox elements for the scrum teams. This is a team based activity where the entire team meets and participates everyday. This meeting is governed by some basic rules, which are extremely important for its effectiveness. We will discuss the rules which not only make the daily standup meetings effective but also help meet the objective of the meeting. I have been advising various teams when they embrace agile on the Rules and ways improvements they can implement in their Daily Standup meetings. This article shares the lessons learned and also experiential ways in which Scrum teams can make this tool of Daily Standups more effective. I have created a quick assessment quiz, Url given in the article below for you which will enable you to self-assess your scrum teams daily standups quality. The intent is to make you aware the areas where improvements are required.

Objective of Daily Standup meetings

The Objective of Daily Standup meeting is to provide the team with a common platform to share information. It allows team to have a disciplined approach to implementing their work on a daily basis and share the information across the team members

It provides the Scrummaster the opportunity to know the status of work done by team members yesterday and what they would be doing tomorrow. She also comes to know what is blocking them and are impediments in their work.

Basic Rules of Daily Standup Meetings

i. ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. It is a Standup and now sit-downs. This is a Daily Meeting and not optional. All Team members join and participate. Chickens join but are observers and do not participate. Usually held at the same time and place each day. Meeting duration is not more than 15 minutes Stand in front of a Visual Artifact like Burndown chart and Tasks board. Objective and not method is important for the Standup No discussions during the meeting technical or otherwise only agenda is: 1. What have you done yesterday? 2. What will you do tomorrow? 3. What impediments are in your way?

Are your daily standups effective?

As Fellow agilists or scrummasters or managers we often wonder if the scrum teams stand-ups are effective or not. For this purpose keeping in mind the rules for daily standup meetings and the feedback received from scrum teams I have created an Assessment quiz which enables you to determine how effective your daily scrums are. The questions asked are on negative behavior which are counter productive or against the rules of daily standups. So for each Yes answered you should give yourself 1 point, If you have a high score the more dis-oriented your daily standups are and need to improve. You can take the Assessment by clicking here . Highest score of 12 would mean your scrum team is not following the basics of Daily standups and a score of zero would mean your team is following all the daily standups and is a role model for others to follow.

How to improve your Daily Standups?

Based on the Assessment results, you should look to improve the areas where you answered Yes, These could be areas which should build an improvement plan as part of inspect and adapt in your scrum. Once you have established the areas of improvement, you could take this up in the next sprint retrospective meeting where the scrum team deliberates and comes up with points or areas where they need to immediately improve. If you have any queries and need help with regards to your assessment results from the quiz do mail me fasleykum@gmail.com I will try to give you some common areas to improve upon based on my observations where daily standups commonly fail. Case of Scrum Team Chargers In a product development company there is a scrum team named Chargers building web based applications. The team consists of 9 members excluding the whole time Scrummaster. The team is working on a high risk time to market web application feature critical for customers of the organization. Chargers are a very motivated team and have been given a target to complete their feature development in 6 sprints. On the First day of the sprint 1 the new Scrummaster collects all the members in a room and starts discussion on how the team members would take on the tasks. The discussions go on for a long time and technical issues like tools to use for building test GUI automation comes up and lasts for about 45 minutes. Scrummaster and the team members feel this was a must have discussion and have accomplished much on the first day. The second day again Scrummaster goes out calling names of the crucial team members and takes the updates on the tasks assigned to them the previous day by him. Other members do not participate and the meeting ends with last discussion on progress of Design documents for the features. The third day half the members turn up for the daily standup meeting some inform the Scrummaster they would not be coming while some do not. Scrummaster goes around the room asking status of work done with the team members present and then closes the meeting. Does this situation sound familiar?

Have you been part of a team where this happened? What is the mistakes team members did? What are the mistakes Scrummaster committed? What are the improvements needed?

Analysis In the above case we see that the scrum team members are very excited and motivated on the first day of the sprint. We also observe that the attendance goes down by third day. In a case like this we see many rules of daily standups being violated. The rules for daily standups help us in building a highly motivated team. Scrum is all about team members participation. It is also about discipline by the crossfunctional and self-organizing team. Scrum is also timeboxed. So these form the three cornerstones of a Daily standup meeting. All team members participate and no one is left out. In the case of Chargers scrum team the Scrummaster took upon their duty to go about the room asking each team member they wished for status. This is wrong, each member get the opportunity to speak one after the other on the three agenda items. This is a discipline which needs to be followed and is extremely critical to build morale of all the team members. Each team member gets the opportunity to speak and explain their work and also bring out any blocking issues they have encountered, it makes the team member belong to the team do not rob this from the scrum team member. If you do then you would face something similar to what the Chargers team faced dwindling participation. When teams participate on a daily basis and team members give their updates on what they did yesterday, they are forced to present it in front of all team members. So if a team member does not do any work on a single day they will have to relook what they would present the next day and will have to pick up work / tasks to accomplish. So a discipline is created within the team. Daily scrum is a time-boxed repetitive even which happens after the sprint planning meeting and goes on till the sprint review meeting during a sprint time-box. A 15 minute meeting with fixed agenda providing maximum transparency. Chargers meeting the 1st and 2nd day went on more than 15 minutes and had more than what was required on the agenda. Hence this was a failure. In order to improve the Chargers Team members would have to come together and one by one give updates instead of the Scrummaster asking for updates. They would give updates on

only three parts of the agenda and then allow others to give their updates. The Scrummaster would not assign tasks but would rather be picked up by the team members who are free. The meeting should end within 15 minutes if discussions are required Scrummaster can ask the required team members to stay back for further discussions. The Scrummaster would update their blocking / impediment list after the daily standup. That should be the real output for the team to accomplish their work they would need the blocks / constraints / impediments to be removed. Conclusion In this article we have looked at the basic ground rules for a daily scrum or standup meeting. The article also provided us a way to self-ascertain if the daily standups are going as per the common rules by undertaking the assessment quiz. The quiz helps determine how much is your scrum team deviating from the expected behavior of a daily standup. Based on the assessment this article advises you to pick up the key items of change and take them to the scrum team in the next sprint retrospective to brainstorm inspect and adapt. We also saw a hypothetical case of a team which had many of these deviations and the recommended approach to correcting them. The article brought out important aspects of Daily standup meeting Participation, Discipline, time-boxed and Transparency.