People new to Scrum often find the number of meetings daunting. It’s natural to want to avoid meetings, if your experience was that they tend to be non-productive. Within the Scrum framework, however, teams use the structured meetings as tools to improve performance over time. Let’s look at Scrum’s most frequent meeting, the Daily Scrum, and see how this comes about.
I’ll get two things out of the way first…
It’s not a status meeting.
It’s a planning meeting. The purpose of getting together every day is not for each team member to report her status. You don’t need a meeting for that—a group email or a time log serves the purpose. Instead, at the daily meeting, the entire team inspects its work in progress, towards its short-term goal. The team as a whole figures out what it needs to do immediately, to attain that goal. I’ll explain more, but for now, all I ask is please stop thinking “status meeting” and start thinking “mini planning session”.
Standing is optional.
It’s up to the team to agree about how to hold the meeting. Many teams stand, as it keeps the meeting quick and high-energy. The Scrum Guide calls it the Daily Scrum, and doesn’t mandate standing up at all. Maybe your team is more productive if it has the Daily Scrum while jogging around the block.
Now that we have an understanding of some things that Daily Scrum is not, we can begin to understand what it is.
Every Daily Scrum is an investment in a more productive team.
As a Scrum Master, the Daily Scrum is an opportunity for me to observe interactions between teammates, and check in on the health of the team. Here are seven key performance indicators to monitor how well a Scrum team is functioning.
1. We are consistent.
Sticking to the same time and place every day means a minimum of overhead. A meeting location is already reserved. Everyone has it on their schedule. All we need to do is show up, ready to go.
2. We’re self-organized.
Shockingly for many Scrum Masters, the team runs their own Daily Scrums. Healthy Scrum teams don’t report in to a Scrum Master. They speak to one another, and they help each other. The team does the heavy lifting, and the Scrum Master is available as a coach and facilitator. This daily practice of team autonomy builds strong teams.
3. We work together.
Silos are inefficient. If you arrive at the Daily Scrum with the intention of getting it over as soon as possible, so you can head back to your desk and get some real work done, then something is wrong. Working in isolation slows the team down. Let me explain.
At the Daily Scrum, the team shares its latest learnings. Everyone is on the same page, at least once every 24 hours. This is also a chance to re-plan, if needed. Each teammate needs to be aware of what the others are doing in order to synchronize work. If someone moves ahead based on wrong assumptions, everyone’s time is wasted. These are the ways that this daily knowledge sharing increases the team’s performance.
The Scrum Master observes the team’s interactions in the Daily Scrum, and is ready to offer guidance. He may suggest that two developers work together to solve a problem, for example.
4. We don’t phone it in.
Well, literally, yes, you can conference everyone in for a Daily Scrum. I’ll get to that later. I’m talking about presence here. Everyone needs to pay attention for the magic to happen. When everyone listens, ready to jump in and offer help, the Sprint picks up pace. The Scrum Master facilitates by noticing if someone is tuning out, and by keeping communication flowing in positive ways.
5. We ’re focused on one goal.
Every member of your team should have the answer to “What is this Sprint’s Goal?” at any moment. Daily Scrum is about the entire team, focused on the Sprint Goal, moving together. Think of a Rugby team, passing the ball to one another as they move down the field. That’s your Scrum team. As a team member, you’re always watching that ball, ready to catch it and pass it again.
6. We are concise.
Daily Scrums are never more than 15 minutes, so each person has at most two minutes to share what they’ve worked on, ask for help, get feedback, and indicate their next move. It’s enough time to get a lot of information across. Over time, the team gets better at communicating the most important bits.
7. We can decide quickly.
Daily Scrums are a practice ground for quick decision-making. The right people are together, along with the freshest, most actionable information. For anything that can be decided immediately, another meeting isn’t needed. For anything that deserves a breakout meeting, the team members can meet immediately after the Daily Scrum.
Being there in person is really important.
Collocated teams are vital in Scrum. Even splitting a team from floor to floor causes disruption. The communication channels that work best for Daily Scrums are, in order of fidelity:
1. Face to face. Meeting in the same space, in real time is by far the very best way to hold a Daily Scrum. Everyone has the advantage of immediacy, eye contact and body language. The team shares the same air and the same light. Standing in a circle, facing one another helps. Each person has the others either in their direct or peripheral vision. People can move around and change places if they need. They can be loud or soft. They cannot use a mute button. They are visible from head to toe.
2. Videoconferencing has many of the advantages of face to face, but even with the best equipment, the experience is degraded significantly. The team still meets at the same time, so immediacy is retained. But every other measure of richness in communication is lost. Eye contact is impossible, since looking directly into a video camera prevents glancing at teammates’ faces as you speak. You have no way of getting any feedback from facial expressions, the way you do in person. Body language is reduced significantly, usually to just heads and shoulders. The best suggestions I’ve heard for making this work are “invest in the best equipment possible on both ends”, and “make sure everyone is videoconferencing, not just the remote workers.” Even people who’ve used videoconferencing successfully strongly recommend supplementing it with frequent face to face meetings.
3. Conference calling. Similar to videoconferencing, you get some immediacy by meeting at the same time. But any information the video channel would have provided is wiped out. People who’ve used conference calling successfully suggest having participants use headsets during the calls. If your company doesn’t have a good conference calling system, you can try a cell phone on speaker to include remote workers.
4. Emailing daily status. Having remote teammates email their status doesn’t provide any immediate feedback at all. It doesn’t encourage the team to engage in a conversation or help a teammate remove impediments. In fact, it puts distance between team members, and discourages them from working together.
Homogeneity.
Whatever method the team chooses, it should be used by everyone. The team’s cohesion is key. If half of the team is videoconferencing while the other half is voice only, the imbalance works against the team.
Make every Daily Scrum count.
Holding a stand-up meeting every morning isn’t doing Scrum. Scrum is all about increasing the value of the team’s time. By paying attention to certain performance indicators, you can use this one, highly focused meeting to as a foundation for building a high performing team.