Improving your Daily stand up ceremony with different questions

This article is mainly for scrum masters and scrum teams, but it can also interest anybody working with an agile team like agile coaches or team leaders

What is the Daily stand up? (very briefly)

 The classical version of the daily stand up is called “Round Robin”. During which each team member answers 3 questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. Did you face any obstacles (Impediments) ?
3. What are you planning to do today?

Providing the above information contributes to team alignment and natural knowledge sharing.

However, I notice while coaching agile teams that these questions become kind of ‘routine’ and the answer to them become mechanical which make the daily stand up more like a status report rather then a collaborative self-organization meeting for the team to plan efficiently their day while taking into consideration changes that might affect their goal.

So here are some questions I propose:

1 - Are we still going to deliver what we promised to deliver at the end of the sprint?Focuses the team on the sprint goal and reveal any risk that might affect the delivery.

2 - What has changed since yesterday? What has changed for our team since yesteray that is worth discussing and might affect our plan?

3 - What do I need to complete the story at hand? The answer to this question might be “nothing special, I just need to work on it” or things like “I need more focus” or “I need additional information” or “I need to get that server up and running”... This question reveals hidden impediments.

4 - Who do I need to work with today? This question reveal collaboration needed, pairing, meetings, exchange of information...

5 - What did I learn since yesterday? This question encourages both knowledge and information sharing that might be helpful for other team members and encourage continuous learning. The answer is expected to be brief and opens the door to more elaborated knowledge sharing sessions if needed.

Some tips to consider when changing the daily format:

1 - You don't want the teams to fall in the routine and you don't want to try something new everyday. You need to use sound judgement to balance injecting new ways of running the daily and keeping some stability for the teams to learn and improve.

2 - When introducing a new question explain briefly why its valuable and what kind of information you expect to get.

3 - Even if you are using Round Robin you can decide to add a question related to the sprint goal (example question 1 from the list) in the middle of the sprint to create alignment.

4 - You can select a combination of questions, introduce it to the team and try it for 1 sprint, then get their feedback and see if they found them valuable. You can always change accordingly.

5 - Limit the questions as this ceremony is time boxed to15 minutes. Remember that sometimes picking one good question can give the team the information they need . Keep side conversations, detailed discussions, analysis... for after the daily in a side meeting.

And if you still like to use the classical questions here is a more sprint goal focused version

If you have tried any of these questions or other new ones in your stand up feel free to share. Your feedback to this article is welcome.