Ideas for an interesting Daily Scrum
As a Scrum Master of a project, I have instructed and coached the dev team on the purpose of the Daily Scrum. I have said many times that the Daily Scrum is not a status update meeting. It is a time to plan what they are going to do for the next 24 hours to achieve the Sprint Goal. To inspect and adapt their work. And discuss any impediments or dependencies they may have.
However, it seems like it still turns out to be a status update. They answer the 3 questions:
- What have you completed since the last meeting to achieve sprint goal?
- What do you plan to complete by the next meeting to achieve sprint goal?
- What is getting in your way in achieving sprint goal?
And then nothing else. No other mentions of dependencies or impediments. Nada.
So, I get the feeling that the dev team does not really understand the purpose of the Daily Scrum. And at this point, I am not sure how to proceed to help them understand the purpose. Just explaining it to them does not seem to help. It has not sunk in for them.
Does anyone have any ideas which I can use to help my team understand the purpose of the Daily Scrum? I was thinking of trying other lines of questioning, like (after they answer the 3 questions), I would ask:
- How do you plan to accomplish what you are going to do for the next 24 hours?
- Who do you to need to collaborate with in order to accomplish your task?
- What kind of support do you need to in order to accomplish your task?
My goal is not for them to really tell me what they are going to do, but for them to think about the process and mention in the Daily Scrum what impediments or dependencies might come up, so everyone is transparent.
Only problem with this method is that it will take more than 15 minutes for the Daily Scrum.
I appreciate any ideas people might have.
Thanks!!
Why not try walking the board rather than 3 questions?
https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/daily-scrums-kanban
Hello Leon,
This could be frustrating from the SM stand point when the team doesn't understand the BIG Picture(GOAL). I hear ya.
Here are tips that helped our team
1) Start on-time and stop on time
2) Keep the rambling down even if this means being a clod turkey and stopping a developer who is repetitively doing the same. Everything you say should be valuable to everyone in the room. Individual talks can happen at any time of the day aside from the stand up meeting. I know they'll lose their train of thought but you need to also understand the agenda of the meeting and respect other team members time.
3) Show them a format that might help them understand. For Example:
What did you do Yesterday(to achieve sprint goal)
- Regarding 45656 ticket related to shopping cart checkout, Went over some wire-frames with Bill, things look good and on schedule, hoping to move this to code review by the end of the day
- Regarding 45663, Had a sync up meeting with Andrea for the new marketing Campaigns. This ticket is part of next sprint but the follow up was necessary to refine the ticket further
What you will be doing today:
- Continue to work on 45656 ticket today and push it to CR if no roadblocks
- Will work on that Code Review ticket 567567, which is adding a re-captcha to xyz screen, Will do this the first thing after the stand up
- Will test the ticket 5676567 later this noon
Roadblocks:
- Mention any roadblocks
BUT
At the end of a developer's update, he/she can mention that there is one open question which he'd like know the team's thoughts on ( I add this step because if there are people working from other timezones, it'll be tough if this dependency carries over to next day)
Good luck!
@Ian Mitchell took my first suggestion and I have found that one to work wonders with teams stuck in the routine you mention.
Another option is to look at the purpose behind those 3 questions. On face value they are just presenting status. But the purpose is to foster conversation about what has been learned recently, how that will affect our work going forward and what do we see as potential problems on the horizon. I coach my teams on the purpose of the questions and then quickly direct them away from addressing the questions. If each person answers the same questions every day, it becomes a routine. When in reality you want the Daily Scrum to be unique every day because it should be discussing how to adjust direction/focus based on what has been recently learned. If the team learns to come together for a short discussion centered around how to adjust the work being done for the very short term future based upon information discovered in the very near past, the Daily Scrum becomes much more efficient and the team will actually want to have the gathering.
What about using some open questions like :
As a team, how confident are you that you will reach the Sprint Goal ? / How is the trend of confidence evolving between the past days ? => What can you do today to raise this confidence ?
How can you minimize the chance you miss the Sprint Goal ?
Imagine you outperform regarding the Sprint Goal, what have you done today ?
I have found that it is better to let the conversation at the Daily Scrum be organic and to not force questions onto the participants. Sometimes, people just need to get something off of their chest and the Daily Scrum becomes their opportunity to do so.