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Saving the Daily Scrum Meeting

January 24, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Communications Management, SCRUM

Saving the Daily Scrum Meeting
By Andrew Mospan

The main objective of the daily scrum meeting is to synchronize team work. Each member of the team should know that the other people on the team are engaged in the tasks allocated to them. What is the benefit of such knowledge? First of all — it reduces the amount of time wasted because of not enough information transfer between team members.

The Scrum meeting is not intended to make decisions on problems that are related to a project. All questions demanding decision making should be a separate discussion taken outside of the scrum.

Sometimes a Scrum meeting will take on issues that are part of the normal working process of the project, or even sit outside of the project entirely. Examples of these potential productivity wasters are:

  • A few individuals drill down into the problem details and begin to resolve the issue during the meeting
  • During the scrum meeting two participants discuss yesterday’s football match
  • Everybody asks the project manager “What is new?”
  • The scrum turns into a meeting where everyone is reporting results to the project manager
  • And, yes at times participants are late for the meeting.

When this happens, meetings can then take much longer than expected. They turn into a major daily meeting trying to resolve project problems. Interest in attending the meetings falls at once, the benefit of the Scrum meeting disappears quickly.

Here are a few tricks that can help to remove issues during daily scrum meeting:

Problem Decision
Meeting turns to report of team members to scrum master or manager instead of team conversation.
  • Explain that the goal of the daily scrum is only to share information to the team.
  • Scrum master should sit out of the line of sight, and not be the focus of the meeting.
Delays.
  • Establish small (symbolic) penalties for meeting delays (“Thank you for being late today. You can get us all coffee after the meeting.” Or “Please tell us your excellent excuse on why you made all of us wait for you.”)
  • Move scrum meeting to a later time.
Discussions are prolonged.
  • Schedule no more than two minutes for each participant.
  • Create a special Action Item table. As soon as any issue causes discussion, The Scrum master will put it to the action item table in the format: “What Who When”.

    For Example:

    What: Discuss problem with controls.
    Who: Tom, Jerry.
    When: Right after scrum meeting…
During the daily scrum meeting, participants depart from theme.
  • Once more — the daily scrum meeting should be short.
  • The place for the daily scrum meeting should be away from emails, Internet and other amusements.
  • Scrum master should manage the scrum meeting properly.

The Scrum meeting is an integral part of the Agile Method of project management. From a very high-level view the definition of Agile Method for project management is a collection of fitting situational best practices that encourages stakeholder participation and communication. The Agile Method in conjunction with the appropriate tools is a good way to manage a project and takes into consideration the individual’s perspective on the processes of teamwork, communication and development.

Andrew Mospan is a Scrum Master at CS Odessa.

Computer Systems Odessa is a leading software development company that builds critical business tools for the desktop. CS Odessa is the maker of Concept Draw, a set of highly functional cross-platform productivity tools.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 and is filed under Communications Management, SCRUM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 people have left comments

Really nice article. Thanks.
I definitely agree with that conjunction of Agile with tools works really well.
So far I was using Scrum and Scrum tools but lately my friend advised me to try Kanban Tool for Scrum. First, I was really surprised that combination of those methodologies might work, but now I’m convinced that it helps a lot with project management.

Tom wrote on January 24, 2010 - 4:37 pm | Visit Link

I once knew a Mospan (Starstroi building superintendent in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk). Do you relate, Andrew?

Also, do you think I could talk to you via Skype - before visiting your marvelous city someday?

Anatoly I. Tatarco wrote on January 25, 2010 - 12:41 am | Visit Link

The second sentence in the intro doesn’t make sense. Is it missing a word, around “than”? It’s unfortunately crucial to the meaning.

Anon wrote on January 25, 2010 - 12:45 am | Visit Link

Hi Anon,

It was a typo, it’s actually “that”. It is now fixed.

Thanks for pointing it out.

PM Hut wrote on January 25, 2010 - 12:49 am | Visit Link

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