Daily Stand-up - Not Just a Ritual

Daily Stand-up is an important tenet of 'Being Agile' journey. With different teams, we witnessed quite different understanding of this ritual. This article is covering brief, but important, overview of Daily standup. For detail reading, I would highly recommend the link given at the end of this article.  

Let us first understand what Daily Stand-up is not, ie the Anti Patterns.

1. It is not a status meeting for Managers - Managers or other stakeholders are welcome to join, but as a listener only. It is difficult to curb the urge to ask questions, which initially seems harmless, but mostly turn into status tracking or influence/demands for delivery gradually, which effects team ownership for daily plan negatively.
2. It is not driven by one person - not even by Scrum Master. With a self-organizing team, it is an opportunity for everyone to meet with colleagues, to talk about own status/ plan/ pain points, to ask help or offer help. Hence, everyone takes ownership. Having said that, a facilitator role helps to instill the habit in team. However, if it is same person and is going on for long, it is a sure sign of anti pattern and deeper problem. Working solution could be to rotate the role of facilitator every week, till team is not in habit. Goal should be self organization.

• It is not for sharing the task status - One common anti pattern is to start narrating each and every task which we are doing including attending meeting and deleting log files. This meet-up is to give broader context to team mates which impact the overall outcome, and defines how we plan and coordinate. It is not a task masters meeting.

What is the purpose of daily stand-up:

• Shared understanding of goals and current status 
• Plan your day (self-management)
• Coordination, ask for help, offer help
• Team communication, Face to Face communication
• Identify as a Team

What are daily stand-up basics (and these are designed for important purpose):

• Fix time
• Fix place
• Must not be more than 15 min
• Whole team gather themselves
• Everyone derive her/his status following three scrum magical questions. 
• Share plan which makes sense to team in bigger context for delivery, It is not about sharing the task heading or status.
• Breakout session at the end or later, if anyone need to discuss more
• Only PIGs are allowed to speak. Chickens can join as listener although (refer to scrum pig/chicken story please)

 NOT to do:

• Not being regular
• Coming without preparation
• Waiting for someone to ask for status
• Story telling or counting tasks without linking it with Product Story or outcome
• Problem solving - Common pitfall, and it is one of the difficult one also to avoid.
• Using it as reporting or tracking meeting, 
• Reporting to a Leader or to SM or to Manager. It is all about team communication.
• Work assignment - Mostly, it is done during sprint plan. There could be few exceptions like helping anyone or any critical issue, which team can take call.
• Running across locations (Solution: Break in co-located teams. Share the brief in Team space – only if day to day work is too interdependent - which is neither ideal, nor productive)

General Guidelines:

• Ensure presence in daily stand-up. This is very important. 
• Team starts gathering at scrum board at decided time, instead of waiting for someone to call.
• Groom habit to share your updates and plan yourselves, without need of someone putting efforts to move the baton. It is your time to share, coordinate and plan the day.

Example Flow:

• Team gathers at decided time
• One person (can do in sequence of who came last :) ) start sharing his/her status and plan using 3 guiding questions, along with moving or adding new notes on scrum board. Ex: 
• Team member A: I completed the validator implementation yesterday and pushed the code, raised the PR. I picked transformer feature, but could not progress much as I am not clear about some design aspects. I shall continue with transformer implementation today, if someone can help me to solve design gaps. Or I shall pick the reporting feature, next item in back log. Can someone help me today for transformer design?
• Team member B: I can help today. We shall decide time after this meet.
• Rotate to next member.
• At the end of update, people can ask brief question if any. 
• Important: Any longer discussion, or problem solving, or technical discussion - do break out session later.
• Rotate across all team members. 
• Done!

Daily Stand-up | Scrum | Agile is not only for technology or software development. These are rather a philosophy to work as a team, and can very well be used for any team environment.

Remember, Agile is all about self-organization, taking feedback, keep adapting to these and keep improving, while delivery in smaller usable chunks, along with increased level of human to human interactions. All these rituals are just enablers for these basic principles.

 Read here, highly recommended for more details

Re-posted from VedantaTree