How to drive efficient daily scrum meetings

Daily scrum meeting or daily standup is one of the important meetings in a scrum process. The idea of this meeting is for the whole team to sync up once a day to talk about their work.

How does it work?

Daily standup is a 15 minute sync up where all the team members, scrum master attend. It is time boxed to strictly 15mins so that the meeting is kept focused and all stick to the agenda.

Where do we conduct this meeting?

It is recommended that daily standup’s are conducted at the same place and same time each day in front of the scrum board if team is co-located. But as we see most of the teams are becoming distributed, daily standup’s are being shifted online and online agile boards are being used.

So what do we do in a daily stand up?

Everyone goes round and gives an update on 3 things.

1. What was done yesterday.
2. What am I going to do today.
3. Any impediments in completing my work.

The updates should be crisp, clear and to the point to show the day’s progress.

Photo by Eden Constantino on Unsplash

What should we not do in a daily stand up?

1. Discuss about work specifics or get into discussions. We can take it post standup but not in the meeting.
2. Treat is like a status call to the manager. Daily standup’s are for the team members to self direct themselves. It should not be treated as a status call but rather a call where all team members sync daily.
3. No reporting. Scrum master is only a facilitator of the meeting. They should not use this meeting to give updates or report information.
4. Extending the meeting beyond 15 minutes. Start the meeting on time and end it on time. Ideally if all team members are co-located then the idea is for all to stand and do the call so that it is wrapped in 15 minutes. If it is a online call it should be time boxed to a 15 minutes call. If it is exceeding then either the team is large in number or the team is going into discussions.
5. Not listening to others. The idea of a stand up call is for all to listen to all and understand what their team member is doing. So everyone should try to listen to what others are working on.

Standup’s are fun and are a great way to start a work day. It gives all a good opportunity to see the work progress. An efficiently run daily standup enables the team to become self-reliant which is the whole idea of having a scrum team.