How you could improve your standup

Lately, I’ve noticed that while some of our teams’ standups were running great, some were treating it more as a status report for the project manager.

For those of you who have been in standups, how familiar is this particular contribution: “Yesterday, I worked on story 441. Today, I plan to continue working on story 441. I have no roadblocks”. While this statement is what a timesheet would have, it brings no value to the team. “What’s 441?” “Are you still on track, or is this story turning out larger than expected?” “What remaining stories do you have in this sprint?” are usually follow up questions by the scrum master or the team lead. However, the whole things sounds very “daily status report”-y.

Also, some teams just don’t have the standup if someone is away, or if the project manager is unavailable.

These teams tend to not understand that the standup is made for their own benefit, and not the project/sprint’s manager.

Tweak your questions

What we’ve been trialling over the past month or so, is to tweak the original 3 questions (1. What have you done since the last standup? 2. What are you planning to work on until the next standup? Is anything blocking you from completing your work?)v ever-so-slightly in order to re-align the standup to what it’s supposed to be achieving: improving communication in the team, generating discussion, and clearing obstacles to reach the sprint goals. Without further ado, these are the questions that we’re asking:

1.       Are you still on track to deliver your sprint commitments?

2.      Can you describe in a couple of sentences what you’ve achieved since the last standup, and how you’re going to achieve the next piece of work you have planned?

3.      Is there anyone on this team or otherwise who can help you work faster?

“At this point, I’m on track to deliver all my commitments for this sprint. Yesterday, I created the back end service for story 441, which is the story to add the ‘Download CSV’ report on the grid view. Today I need to create the front end elements, and do some dev testing before passing it off to QA. If you can set up a demo database with dummy data for me, it would help me finish my testing quicker.“

At the end of the day, these 3 questions still bring out the same information as the previous original 3. The first thing it does is highlight the "big picture", which in this case is the sprint commitment, over the current task or story they're working on. Also, we’ve noticed that this format generates a lot more discussion, as the team members are more willing to discuss implementation techniques, or offer advice if they had similar issues in the past. Also, as a scrum master, I get an idea about the sprint status, and whether the project manager needs to be aware of any delays.

Funnily enough, the team is more likely to flag obstacles or roadblocks by asking them the 3rd question in that format, rather than “is there anything that’s blocking you?”, since people usually feel that being block is a negative sign, or something to be embarrassed about. Whereas “who can help you work quicker?” usually yields some interesting responses, as it’s shifting the problem away from the person, and onto something/someone else who is delaying them from achieving their peak performance.

I’ve also asked the project managers to decrease their attendance, so the team feels less likely to revert back to “status report” mode. I would then flag any issues or delays after the catch up ends.

Three more tips

Try your best to keep people on their feet. Literally. It’s called a standup, not a “sitdown”.

1. Nobody should be taking notes (or minutes) during a standup, this is an informal meeting for team discussion. It's not a demo either, so no laptops.
2. If a particular idea drags for more than a couple of minutes and a few of the attendees go down a rabbit hole of discussion where the others are just silently there, it’s up to the scrum master to interrupt, and ask those engaged in the discussion to continue their chat after the standup is done, as it shouldn’t drag for more than 15 minutes.
3. Don’t do it over slack or group chat. Just don’t. Nobody reads the messages, it doesn’t work.

Just remember that the whole idea of a standup is to choose what works for you and your team.

Do you have any standup tips or tricks that work for your team?