How To Unleash The Benefit From Daily Scrum (Part 1)

How often have you found a useless daily huddle, daily stand up, sync up whatsoever you can call it?

How do you feel about it?

If you expect to find what is the best way to do daily scrum in this article, sorry, it won’t be explained here because there are no such things as best practices!. Let me re-highlight again: THERE’S NO BEST WAY TO DO IT.

But let me help you to find some areas of improvement.

Here are some usual symptoms that are causing your feeling above:

1. Timing issue
   1. It took so much of our time
   2. The team didn’t commit to the schedule
2. Facilitating issue
   1. No clear output and outcome from the conversation

IT TOOK SO MUCH OF OUR TIME

I don’t mean to be a preacher of Scrum guide, but in reality, we can do it in less than 15 minutes, seriously, for real. If you find your last daily scrum took more than that, the first thing you can do is learn about the historical event by (1) recording your daily scrum session & (2) re-hearing/re-watching the session.

Then counting the duration of:

1. Problem explanation
2. Problem-solving discussion
3. Action items generation
4. Others

The first element that we definitely can remove is (4) Others.

The only thing we should keep is (3) Action items generation.

What if (1) Problem explanation took so much time? Here are some ideas that you can play around with:

1. Be prepared by summarizing your explanation
2. Only highlighting information that is relevant to others
3. Postponed the explanation as an action items

What if (2) Problem-solving discussion took so much time? See below other ideas:

1. First thing first, be brave to cut off the discussion
2. Postponed the problem solving as an action item

Focusing only on action item generation could save each other time. We only involve relevant people in discussion while still keeping the overall essential issues during the day.

And the most important thing is to put in our mindset that it is okay not to solve everything in 15 minutes. We only have to keep our attitude to adapt your delivery strategy as soon as the problem comes.

Here’s the end of Part 1. Feel free to put any comments or feedback regarding this article.

I’ll see you again in the next part.