The Real Value of the Daily Scrum

DOING AWAY WITH THE DAILY SCRUM*?

We all learned about the importance of a daily standup in most of the Agile classes, particularly in Scrum classes. I recently had a group tell me that they were going to do away with the daily standup because it provided no value. When you are working in an Agile environment, everything must provide value. But eliminating something without inspecting and adapting is not going to yield the results you want or need.

Instead, I challenged this team to do a mini-retrospective on their daily standup, and see if anything became apparent. Why were people not showing up? Why wasn’t it providing value? Once they did this, the problems became clearer, and the solution even more so. The standup had become so rote that it was just a group of people rambling on for 15 minutes.

“We have items in the backlog that we have to do.”

THE PERFECT FORMULA?

Where had they gone wrong? What had they lost in translation along the way? They were doing what the courses teach you. “This is what I did yesterday. This is what I am going to do today. These are my impediments.” That’s the perfect formula right?

The short answer is “maybe” but the longer answer is about what they are missing. They focused on a process without looking at the value proposition. The first question I asked is “How is what you’re doing ensuring that the team meets its Sprint Goals?” There was complete silence. I then said “Could someone please tell me what the Sprint Goals are for the Sprint that started yesterday?” Again, this was met with silence. “If nobody is willing or able to state the Sprint Goals, how do you know they are being met?” This time I got an answer. “We have items in the backlog that we have to do.”

WHY DO THE DAILY SCRUM?

Bingo! We landed on the first problem to solve. The team did not see a connection between even knowing the Sprint Goals and the work that they were doing, because to them it was just a list of items to complete. Therefore, the daily standup had become a status report of what they were ticking off on the list.

Once we had this critical piece of information, we were able to quickly turn around a “useless meeting” into a value added touch base. I reminded everyone that the daily standup was not a status report, but rather a way for the product development team to stay connected and check up on how they were doing at achieving the Sprint Goals, and where there could be potential pitfalls. This was especially important, given that they were distributed, on The very next day I guided them through a new way to do the standup. It was a bit jumbled the first day, until they realised where we were headed. Then they were off and running.

VALUE ADDED DAILY SCRUMS

The new format started with an administrative task that they chose to incorporate due to the distributed nature of the team, for situational awareness. They started with any absences for the day that could impact work, a reminder of any key critical meetings or events (e.g. Planning Poker), and any hotfixes or releases put out the prior day that may need to be monitored. 

Then the Scrum Master, whom they chose to have to facilitate the meeting, asked for a volunteer to state the Sprint Goal. If there was no response within 3 seconds, they said “Person Name could you help us out with this.” Once the Sprint Goal was stated, the facilitator then asked the Product Development team to provide a view into where they were with the various parts of the goal, and any help that they needed for the day. 

The “help” may consist of “we are going to need extra support from (insert person)” or it could be a request to have an offline meeting immediately after the standup to delve into an issue. Of course, issues were not discussed in complex detail during the standup. 

At the end of the meeting, the Support team, who attended for awareness, was asked if there were any incidents in the queue that could impact time on the Sprint Goal due to criticality.

“Wow! It is like a whole new team showed up at 9:00 this morning.”

Within three days, the team had settled into a comfortable pace with the meeting. The Sprint Goal was readily stated at the top of the meeting with no volunteering needed, and the feedback from the team was along the lines of “Wow! It is like a whole new team showed up at 9:00 this morning.”

While this is only a small example of how inspecting and adapting should be working for your team, the message is clear. Teams are not engaged if they don’t see value in what they are doing. They also need to understand that their fate is in their own hands. If something isn’t working, they need to deconstruct the problem and find a solution. And finally, everything in this way of working must provide value. Because there’s simply just not enough time to create a product that provides value, if the actions to get there don’t. 

*Original article used Daily Standup but to be more inclusive and to follow the current terminology we have updated the article

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INDRA A. BOOKS

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