One More Question to be asked in the Daily Scrum

Daily Scrum is one of the very important practices in the Scrum Framework, where all the team members come together for a short meeting in the earlier morning. Typically, and also as recommended by the standard Scrum, three questions are to be asked to everyone, those are:

1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?

the team members should focus on answer those questions, in order to keep the meeting as short and efficient as possible. However, there should be another question to be asked, along with those three: What did I not do yesterday?, and the question should follow the first question to be asked.  The question will provide following benefits to the Scrum team if everyone think about it:

1. Make the daily planning more accurate

If there're something that had been planned by answered the question "what will I do today" in the last daily Scrum was not done actually, the team member should think about the potential root cause. It could be the planned tasks were out of the capacity of that guy, and if that is the case, he/she then need to adjust the planning according to his/her real capacity, to make the planning to today more accurate.

2.Prioritize daily tasks

There could be other reasons that cause the planned tasks had not been completed, such as some urgent cases or some really urgent helps that had been expected from somebody else, and those consumed both time and energy. Though we expected the single task flow in Agile and Lean, in order to keep the team to be as dedicated as possible, it would be hard to prevent things to happen, especially those exceptional ones. By figure out the answers to the question, it would help the team members to find out what're those exceptions and then prioritize them before jumping into the cases immediately.  

3.Make a consistent thinking flow

 The last question of the daily Scrum is "What obstacles are impeding my progress?", where the "obstacles" or "impedes" that prevents the planned stuff being completed by yesterday. If everything that has been planned was completed, it would make no sense to say something like "we've those obstacles to be tackled....". But if there're something haven't been complete, then obviously there're some obstacles, and those obstacles need to be removed to get the uncompleted but planned  to be  completed. The question and the last question forms a consistent thinking flow, the answer to the question is the premise of the answer to the  last question.

4. Find out potential improvement opportunities

The team could definitely try to make their daily tasks planning as close to the reality, and try to ensure that everything being planned is completed every day. However, if there're too many items that has been planned was not completed, it would be a good signal to the Scrum Master that there could be something wrong in the development, and he/she could find out some hints in all those answers from the daily Scrum, and summary the actions to make the improvements, as inputs to the Retrospective Meeting  by the end of the Sprint.

Appreciate if you would like to share your thoughts and opinions by leaving your comments below (or through [email protected])

Thanks a lot! 

Joseph Yu