Daily stand-up meetings act as a pulse check for agile teams. They are concise status-report gatherings that aim to keep everyone engaged, on the same page, and aware of one other's progress. Just as a pulse check provides important information about one's health, the daily stand-up meeting gives agile teams information about their progress so they can perform effectively as a unit and complete projects.
In general, developers, designers, product owners, and stakeholders should all be present at a daily stand-up meeting for an agile team. The daily stand-up's objective is to encourage openness, cooperation, and communication among team members, so it's ideal to have all team members present. It's crucial to remember that the daily stand-up should be as brief as possible so that the team can resume their tasks right away. That's why it's important to keep attendance to a minimum and confine the meeting's discussion to progress updates, difficulties, and upcoming steps.
The daily stand-up meeting agenda is quite straightforward. Just like a coach uses a playbook to guide their team to victory, a daily stand-up meeting uses a set of carefully-crafted questions to keep an agile team on track and focused. From updates on progress and challenges to upcoming deadlines and dependencies, these questions cover topics that help the team stay coordinated as they move towards a common goal. As a result, the daily stand-up meeting becomes more than just a routine check-in; it functions as a powerful tool for collaboration, communication, and progress.
Most teams follow a standard template of three questions in order to keep the daily scrum meetings short and relevant. These questions are usually:
The answer to the first question should be very brief, and teams should mostly spend time on identifying problems before they snowball into bigger ones. Many teams treat their daily stand-up as a simple status update for their boss, but it's a lot more than that. Daily stand-ups for agile teams represent a commitment to the final goal. Like many other rituals, these meetings are most effective when all teammates understand the value behind the practice. Otherwise, it becomes a mindless ritual.
When several or more people have to work together, there's bound to be some challenges. Face-to-face communication can go a long way in easing conflicts, and holding daily stand-ups will help your team:
In an agile project where a lot can change from one sprint to the next, it's imperative that the entire team stay aware of all that's happening and how it effects the project.
Spending time with your team will help you connect with them as individuals. Team dynamics are influenced not only by the nature of your work, but also by the personalities and the relationships within your team. Beyond mutual respect, it's important that your team members be able to relate to each other.
Two brains work better than one. Whether they're problem-solving or optimizing a current practice, knowledge-sharing within a team will greatly improve efficiency.
In most team stand-up meetings, the Scrum master acts as the facilitator and decides who's going to speak next. This is a subtle act against self-organization. You could use other methods like round-robin (this starts with a random person and goes clock-wise or counter clock-wise) or pass-the-token (in which only the person who's holding the token can speak, after which they throw the token to a random person). With predictable mechanisms like round-robin, people often ignore the speakers until its closer to their turn, while random methods like pass-the-token keep the team on their toes.
Instead of the three-questions template, structure your stand-ups by walking through the Scrum board of your project management tool. You can start with the ones on the top-right side of your board—the ones closest to deployment. Then, go from top to bottom and from "Done" to "To do." This way, the focus is less on individual updates and more on the progress of the team as a whole.
The ideal stand-up meeting should be 15 minutes or less. As teammates get more comfortable with each other, your stand-ups may start getting longer. A gradual increase becomes harder to spot. An effective way to reduce rambling or digression in your daily stand-ups is to time your meetings and share it with your team everyday.
Identifying impediments is an important goal of a daily stand-up but it's not the place for problem-solving. You can maintain an improvement board where problems are jotted down as and when they're identified. With a visual acknowledgment of the problem, the team is less likely to delve into it during the meeting. When a problem is identified, assign the responsibility to a team member and all further discussions are postponed.
When the Scrum master is the facilitator and the team follows the three-question template, team members tend to face the Scrum master when they speak. Instead of a meeting, it can become a group of individuals reporting to the facilitator. Rotating the facilitator for each meeting, changing the position of the team members, or even an act as small as the facilitator deliberately breaking eye contact can encourage people to talk to their team.
The pace of a meeting could slow for a variety of reasons—people are unprepared, speakers start to ramble, or everyone is done speaking and their voices trail off into an awkward silence. Rambling can be reduced by timing your meetings. If your team is unprepared, you might want to think about rescheduling the meeting to work around their schedule or talking to them to find out if there is a bigger issue at hand. If you want to end your meeting on a high note, you could come up with a phrase your team can shout in unison at the end of your daily stand-up. It's a simple, yet powerful technique. It could be something as simple as "Go [team name]!" or something more quirky like"Code, Push, Merge, Repeat" or "Let's crush those bugs!"
A daily stand-up meeting is a crucial tool that can greatly boost communication and, in turn, efficiency within your team. It's important to be aware of why you're doing something in order to do it the right way, regardless of how small or routine the practice is. In this way, be conscious of your daily scrum meetings, mix things up with new exercises when you find the meetings getting a little ritualistic, and regularly take a new look at how you can make it even better.
In Zoho Sprints, you can schedule recurring daily stand-up meetings for the entire duration of your sprint. Meeting reminders are sent as emails and in-app notifications. Record your takeaways in the group chat so that you can take them up as actionable items after the meeting.