I hate meetings. Really, I do. They are toxic.
But one of the things your team needs to do is meet daily. With agile, it’s called the daily standup or daily scrum meeting. But what is it?
- Every Day, 15 minutes
The meeting needs to be every day. Every day (Monday-Friday). No Exceptions. No days off, no skipping, no excuses. Schedule it every day. 15 minutes. Try to get it in the same place - Stand up
The reason it is called a “standup” meeting is that you need to actually stand up. Why? Because sitting down makes people take their time. Standing up makes people move faster, because they don’t want to stand for 60 minutes. - Three Questions
What I did yesterday? What am I doing today? What’s in my way? Simple enough - Not Everyone
You want your do’ers there, you want the scrum master and product owner, maybe some others, but not everyone needs to talk. Go around the room and the do’ers should give an update, others should just listen. - Details, but not too much
Do’ers, when giving updates, should let team know what stories they are working on. If you use a virtual+physical board, you will have story #’s. Don’t just spout the numbers. Spout the numbers and the story title, and where you are at, maybe even burndown if you track that manually. - Keep on Track
easy to get off track. Even with standing and whatever. Scrum master should make sure things keep moving. In, update, out, go. 15 minutes? Try to get done in 10.
Should you meet on your sprint planning day? I say yes.
What else does the daily standup bring us? Communication. Everyone should know what everyone else is working on, where things are at. People can’t hide. They need to give updates, they probably should have a good reason or be working on something else off sprint if they have no update.
What else does it bring? In my eyes: Discipline. Making sure you know what you did, what you are doing, and always meeting at the same time, and doing the same thing every day brings a little discipline to the team. Keeping things on track, 15 minutes, cruising through updates, instead of meeting speak and 60 minutes of babbling. It does good for everyone. It lets your do’ers get on with their day so they can keep burning down points!
Steve Novoselac's Blog 