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In any project, the daily scrum or daily standup is an important ceremony. How you treat the scrum and how you implement it is directly correlated to workplace productivity. However, it is difficult to ensure that the meeting doesn’t go off track, especially since these scrums tend to happen at the start of the work day.
Meetric can help you run effective scrum meetings that stay on track. Here’s how you can conduct a daily scrum in a productive manner.
What is scrum?
According to Scrum.org, a daily scrum is a “15-minute time-boxed event for the development team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours”.
In a nutshell, this means that the daily scrum is a tool that helps track progress toward a sprint goal. It also helps the team understand if the sprint backlog has been addressed. This meeting is an opportunity for the team to connect with each other and understand how their work relates to the team’s goals.
Effective scrums lead to better team communication and fewer unnecessary meetings. It also helps identify obstacles, improves the team’s knowledge base, and facilitates faster decision-making.
Here are five tips for a great daily standup.
1. Define the Meeting Purpose
An important reason why daily scrums to go off track is the lack of a defined purpose. The meeting facilitator should remind the team about the objective of an agile scrum.
During the meeting, team members should:
- Make commitments to each other.
- Give an update on work progress.
- Raise issues and address blockers.
Don’t use the scrum to report status to the manager and don’t discuss solutions to problems. This can make the meeting monotonous and it will run longer than the scheduled 15 minutes. If the scrum starts to feel like just another chore, then it’s time to take a step back and realign it with your team’s work processes.
2. Be Prepared for your Scrum
Use a template to keep your scrum meetings short and focused. With Meetric, you can create your own scrum template to be used for future scrums. Questions that usually feature in every template are:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- Are there any blockers or dependencies?
With Meetric’s Slack integration, you can update or add to your notes, pin messages, and be prepared for your scrum. You can also get action items from previous scrums and update their status.
3. Maintain a Consistent Scrum Schedule
Fix a time for scrum everyday and stick to it. Ensure that your team shows up punctually. This can prevent the meetings from running overtime. Make sure that your team’s task list is nearby so that everyone can refer to it while making commitments for the day.
4. Share Notes with Your Team
Once the scrum is over, sharing notes pushes the team to stick to their commitments. It serves as a beacon for their work and creates a productive and collaborative workforce. Maintaining a record of the scrum notes makes team members more accountable. Work status becomes transparent for all stakeholders. This can be easily done by sharing the link to the Meetric document which was used to take minutes and create a list of actionable next steps for each team member. Everyone stays updated and nothing falls through the cracks.
5. Make Your Scrums Fun
Don’t let your scrum become just another boring routine. Here are a few ideas to try at your next scrum.
- Shake things up and use some fun music to signal the start of the scrum. This can help jumpstart your meeting and make it exciting.
- Offer a reward. Be creative: offer snacks, movie tickets, or gift vouchers for being prepared for the scrum.
Scrum is all about finding processes that work for your team and being consistent. Flexibility and consistency are key principles that make daily scrums effective. Set the meeting agenda and progress towards the sprint goal. And don’t forget to add a dash of fun.
