Daily Scrum Anti Patterns & Coaching Approach

When I talk to development teams & asked about Agile, they start talking about daily scrums so this is the kind of popularity of daily scrums.

Though everyone has heard about Daily Scrum but I have seen many dysfunctions with this practice.

So I thought of sharing my knowledge & experience what all I have observed with respect to daily scrum & how I helped teams in correcting that dysfunctions.

Understanding Daily Scrum

Daily Scrum is the 15 minute meeting that makes product development teams more productive and efficient. The key objective for a Daily Scrum meeting is to ensure that the activities of each team member are aligned in progress the project towards successful completion of the team goal.  I will rather say, it is a meeting in which team members make commitments to each other. It is one more opportunity for team to coordinate, inspect, both a product and a process based on the previous day outcome & adapt based on the condition. Hence Daily scrum is all about reviewing progress toward the Sprint goal, assess any risks to the Sprint commitment, make adjustments if sprint commitment cannot be met & inculcate accountability. 

How it benefits

1) Concisely present an accurate view of team progress & work 2) Impediments are surfaced in this meeting, providing an opportunity to everyone work toward resolving impediments 3)  The Daily Scrum is intended to disrupt old habits of working separately & make the team self-organized 4)  Inculcates Accountability, Here each team member shows accountability to other team members for their responsibilities

During my coaching journey, have observed many anti-agile patterns in Daily Scrum.

1)    Turning the Daily scrum to status check meeting

2)    No time boxing, meeting exceeding 15 mins on daily basis, primarily because impediments being discussed during scrum itself

3)    Making it a turn-based 1:1 chat with the project manager or scrum master. This completely defeats the purpose of the Daily Scrum and should be avoided at all costs.

4)    No routine or fixed time slot fixed for daily scrum

5)    Team not listening to other member updates as they feel the code/activity they are working on has nothing to do with them.

6) One of the greatest misuses of feedback from the daily scrum is not using the feedback itself. If the team is not engaged or not understanding the nature of the daily scrum they may just think it is a status meeting and they do not use the feedback given by each team member to inspect and adapt. Example, when a team member is indicating a task is much harder than he thought other team members don’t offer any help.

Those project teams practicing the above mentioned anti patterns, don’t achieve the benefits that can result from the Daily scrum meeting, indeed their performance and potential is somewhat capped by the command and control model of a traditional status reporting meeting.

This is valuable time that should be treated as collaborative effort for the whole team else Problems can go unnoticed if no one comments or asks any follow-up questions

 My Approach I have used many approaches till now based on the team mindset & their maturity level.

1) One of effective way of coaching I have practiced is to video record a couple of stand ups and then asks the team to watch the videos back. It makes the team self-realize the anti-patterns (Only possible at client side).

2) In order to make Daily scrum meeting successful other than discarding the anti-patterns, one thing which have worked in my case is after few daily scrum meetings, go through your first retrospective discussion regarding this meeting & let team decide collectively what aspects should be continued, improved or abandoned & then have a definition of the daily scrum meeting practices under team working agreements.

3) Quick training session on the Daily Scrum and its purpose, it is also helpful for team to understand the value behind daily scrum.

4) Building the trust between Product Owner & team since reason behind micro management is missing trust factor.

5) Gamifying the scrum, game which works well with the team is “Daily Scrum Simulation”. Through this game, team gets a fair understanding of team collaboration and what it takes to build upon each other’s work. Here I get an opportunity to highlight more dysfunctions in funny manner & open ended questions after the simulation/role play can create the desired impact on the team. If I see team members were working in silos, not active collaborating & listening to each other in daily scrum, this game is one of my attempt to break this dysfunctional culture.

6) The other approach I take to coach the team “who are not listening to others team members” is to help them create Team Working Agreements, which documents what is acceptable behavior & what is not. Thus enabling team traverse through these challenges.

7) Few times, I also let the team face small consequences of missing Daily Scrum & eventually miss the sprint goals or quality commitments. During retrospective, I make them self-realize the importance of daily scrum by asking thought provoking questions like “Would this particular issue have been avoided if Daily scrums were used effectively”.