Recently I received a question about how to help team members stay engaged during daily Stand Up meetings. I didn't have a chance to ask, but I suspect that the questioner was experiencing the StandUp "downers" that happen on too many teams––no clear questions, responses that are too long or too rambling or both, inadequate understanding about the "why" behind the practice, less often than daily, etc. Are you having "Stand Downer" meetings too? If so, I decided to share my answer with you as well.
StandUps offer the most benefit when they are kept brief (30-60 seconds per team member), frequent, and to the point––sustaining communication about the state of the work. It helps when team members know the questions ahead of time and come prepared to answer them succinctly. Stealing a suggestion I learned from James Shore, I recommend that each person write their answer on an index card to bring to the meeting.
However, the “three questions" don’t need to always be the same. For fun and variety, and to keep it engaging, insert new questions from time to time, e.g. every other week or monthly. As you try new questions, make sure they stay focused on the work. Some possible variations:
Set A. (The Classic)
- What story did you work on yesterday? Who worked on it with you?
- What story do you plan to tackle today? Who will you work with on it?
- What obstacles, if any, do you anticipate to finishing?
Set B. (Shared Learning)
- In the work you did yesterday, what did you learn that could help the whole team?
- What do you hope to learn today? How will you share it with all of us?
- What gets in the way of your learning?
Set C. (Finding Help)
- What helpful resources (e.g., websites, books, articles, repositories, team member expertise, etc.) did you access yesterday for your work?
- Where will you look for help today?
- When have you found it difficult to find helpful resources? What gets in the way?
Set D. (Achieving the Plan)
- How did you help the team move toward achieving our iteration plan yesterday?
- How will you help us move forward on the plan today?
- What will impede your progress?
- On a scale of 0 (no way) - 5 (super confident), how confident are you that we will complete all the work in our iteration plan?
Set E. (Continuous Integration)
- What did you commit yesterday?
- What do you hope to commit today?
- What hinders your ability to continuously integrate your work today?
Note Bene: The path to removing any obstacles, impediments, hindrances, or problems should be discussed separately, by relevant parties only, outside of the standup meeting. This can happen just afterwards or later, but it's not part of the daily StandUp.
In addition, if your StandUps are suffering from any of the dysfunctions listed above, the answer is to make them even shorter and more frequent. I worked with a high-functioning team of 8 people that held two StandUps a day. Each meeting was no more than 5 minutes. This way we all stayed updated on what the whole team was working on and our rate of progress toward our outcome. We were each able to jump in to help when our particular skills were most needed. It added to our effectiveness and our efficiency. When we saw that our progress was slowing, we increased to three daily meetings: early morning, after lunch, and end of day, so we could even better stay in synch. Still each under 5 minutes.
You can do it!
Comments
Hi Diana – good suggestions. I also suggest that the focus of the Stand up (the right name being Daily Scrum if the team is doing Scrum) be about Sprint Goal. Daily Scrum is a transparency, inspection, adaptation meeting. They make transparent what was done in the past 24 hours, the then inspect their current plan and if the plan is good enough to achieve the Sprint Goal and if not, they re-plan (adapt) their current plan to maximize the probability of achieving the Sprint (or Iteration, if you prefer that word) Goal. The whole team should cohesively work together as one unit to achieve the Sprint Goal.
Shameless self-plug – I have a few other tips to make the Daily Scrum effective here – https://innovagility.com/2017/01/17/ten-tips-to-make-your-daily-scrum-more-effective/
Great stuff. Thanks again, Diana.
This is a very dear topic to me, as I believe being able to execute short feedback loops is key in succeeding as an agile team, and the StandUp is a great practice to achieve this practically.
I found it terrific you kept the focus on the why of the practice while providing useful advise about the how.
I wonder if stating explicitly the goal of the daily StandUp can help us readers stayed focus and aligned to what we are trying to achieve. I believe the main aim of the StandUp is helping the team synchronize, closing the daily feedback loop by seeing what happened since last StandUp , agreeing on the plan until next one and identifying difficulties so we can adapt.
Thanks for the reminder that problem solving is done afterwards with all and only the relevant people.
Many teams progress work mainly by a succession of individual tasks or even have a need to focus on the team members’ mutual accountability in order to achieve their goals and in that circumstance the sets of questions you listed above sound great to me. I love it that you insist in formulating the questions depending on what the focus of the team is.
It also occurs to me a team can be in a different situation, in which they need to focus in the collective progress of the team. For instance, a team in which user stories are small and implemented by very close collaboration between multiple team members; or a team in which the focus is moving away from individual tasks and towards greater collaboration. In that case I have worked in teams doing StandUps in which, instead of asking ourselves individually, we “walked the board” , choosing a card at a time, top to bottom in priority order, and asked all team members working on that specific item:
(Actions oriented)
- What have we done since last stand-up to progress this item?
- What can we do until next one to progress this item?
- What obstacles are in our way?
(Collaboration focused)
- What effective ways of working together in this item did we find yesterday?
- How can we organize today so we ensure effective collaboration on this item?
- Can we apply all relevant skills and expertise to this item in a collaborative way? If not, what is making difficult for us to work together in this item?
(Speed focused)
- What ways of speeding up this item did we find yesterday?
- What can we do today that will help us finish this item?
- What slowed us down in getting this item progressed? Is there a way to work in less items at a time? Would that be faster?
What we observed was more focus on the collective achievement and less in the individual contributions, which we thought worked for what we needed. No need to say this is situation-specific and I do not intend to present it as a replacement for the individual-focused questions you present but literally just as a “yes, and.. there is this other way for this specific situation”.
What do you think about this other way of organizing the conversation in the StandUp around the work, instead of the worker? Does it make any sense? How would you make it better?