Get more Efficient at Daily Scrum Standups
My crew encompasses 3 product owners, 9 developers and a development lead. As the ScrumMaster, I’ve always done my best to keep the daily standups as efficient and productive as possible while within 15 minute window.
Considering the fact that product owners were often chicken in the standup, everyone got roughly 2 minutes to share his status. However, this is easier said than done:
- A couple of people showed up a few minutes late; missing a part of the conversation, they would start asking some questions
- If someone raised an impediment, others tried to help him and they would get into a detailed discussion
- A developer described a work item finished the day before and the rest of the team started asking question about the outcome… sometimes 5 minute a person became normal
- …
I actually tried establishing some rules about showing up late, basically “encouraging” people to be on time (I’m not going into the details, you can figure out what the best rules are based on your team’s culture). Then I brought a jingle bell to the standups, which would go off when a person’s two minute was up. That helped adjusting people’s status update pace, but did not improve the quality of the content; we were still hearing a lot of details.
So we made another change to refocus people on the relevant topics. Instead of going around the circle and ask everyone “what did you do, what are you going to do, any impediment”, we started going over stories on the Scrum board and asking whether there was an update since yesterday’s standup; what or why not. Going down through the list of stories, people would move the tasks on the board or raise hand if there were blocked. We then put a red sticky note on the board next to each story for correspondent blocking issues, but no one was allowed to get into the details at the standup. After the standup, interested parties would stay and discuss the issues. So here is a sample standup:
Me: “is there any update for story A”
Jon: “task A1 is now completed, task A2 and A3 are in progress, not blocked”
Me: “is there any update for story B”
Steve: “Task B3 is done, task B4 is blocked on network issue”
Me: “here is a red sticky for the network issue next to story B”
…
Steve, Jon and I then would discuss the details of the network issue after standup.
This might seem to be a very simple change, but it did actually help improve the efficiency of the standups significantly.
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Good day
Hamed