You’re Doing Daily Scrum Meetings Wrong: Effective Strategies for Real Impact

“Unlock the Hidden Potential of Your Daily Scrum Meetings: 
Stop Missing Out on Opportunities for Team Success”

source: Nano Banana

Introduction

I wrote this article due to the numerous discussions about Daily Scrum Meetings over the years. Discussions with managers who, of course, being too lazy to follow the tickets, and preferred meetings instead. As well as team leads and “Scrum masters”.

In this article, I want to shed light on the origin of the Daily Scrum meeting. Explain why the current way of doing daily Scrum is not really helping a development team or the software delivery speed. I will share my experiences, what I did differently and the outcome. You will learn that a daily meeting can be more effective than how you run it today.

From Bartender to Tech Lead: My Journey to Understanding Team Dynamics

Let’s start with who I am, don’t worry it won’t be my memoirs you are going to read, but I need to give you a bit of a background.

My first job started in food and beverages as a bartender. The owner of the restaurant was so kind to teach me the ropes and started to train me in more than tending the bar. She taught me how to serve plates and become a waiter. She taught me etiquette and how to dress and serve a table. In a couple of months I was a bartender/waiter.

At a restaurant we work in shifts. You have breakfast, lunch and dinner shifts. You start early to prepare the service, they call that “mise en place” in French. So around 8:00 or 9:00 the first service of the day will start to serve breakfast, but before the service starts everybody in the restaurant gets together. The kitchen members, bartenders, waiters, dishwashers, everybody. And we go over a checklist to see if everything is done, when this is done you get some motivational words and service begins.

During service the only thing that matters is “Get The Job Done”, in this case its serving food and drinks and make clients happy. Everybody chips in, no matter what their original task is, if there is a table of 15 people, bartenders will help waiters to get the plates on the table at the same time. Dishwashers will help bartenders to restock the fridges with beverages. This dance goes on until 10:30 or 11:00, then we need to clean everything, redress the tables and be prepared for the lunch service which will start at 11:30. The complete staff gets into a huddle again, go over the checklist, get the motivational speech and “Gets The Job Done”, and before the dinner service this dance will happen again.

Decoding Agile: Tracing the Origins and Evolution of Scrum

In 2007, I started a bachelor ICT, this field was completely new to me and I soaked up all the knowledge I could get my hands on. One of the books was “Software Project Secrets — Why software projects fail” by George Stepanek. In the book I got my first encounter with Agile and the “Agile Manifesto”, if you don’t know what I’m talking about you definitely have to read the manifesto, because this is the only definition of Agile in my opinion.

Embracing Agile Principles: The Core Values That Drive Success

There are “12 Principles of Agile Software” and the introduction goes like this:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 
- Working software over comprehensive documentation 
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 
- Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Being intrigued by Agile, I searched for more information and stumbled on a paper called “SCRUM: An extension pattern language for hyperproductive software development”

In that paper I found a definition of a Scrum meeting:

During a Sprint, Scrum Meetings are held daily to determine on:
1) what items were completed since the last Scrum Meeting.
2) what issues or blocks have been found that need to be resolved. (The ScrumMaster is a team leader role responsible for resolving the blocks.)
3) what new assignments make sense for the team to complete until the next daily scrum meeting

This instantly reminded me on how we would start a service in a restaurant or bar. They also made a comparison with a rugby scrum, which is a team huddle where tactics are announced and motivational words spoken to the players. Not only in sports do they have this kind of huddle; doctors, nurses, the fire department, and the police also practice it, to name a few examples.

Starting My Agile Adventure: Lessons Learned and Insights Gained

From then on I started to implement this new knowledge, asking my team members about their status. I did it on my own behave, just asking every member what they were doing and what issues they had. In 2012, Barco was the first company I worked for as a freelance consultant that embraced the Agile and Scrum way of work.

In 2014 I was tech lead at KBC Touch: Savings & Investments, I got thoroughly trained and coached in Agile and Scrum. An Agile coach and Scrum coach followed me all day to every meeting and taught me how to manage my teams in Belgium, Spain and India. Every day I had multiple dailies with each team and then a daily of dailies to inform my managers.

To be honest, Scrum was by then already far away from the original idea and was already becoming a certification industry that was all about money and less about delivering software in my opinion.
Don’t get me wrong I like Agile & Scrum, but I had much more experience by then and had managed multiple teams. And I realized that every team has its own flavor of doing things.

Reimagining the Daily Scrum: Breaking Down and Building Up

So let’s pause here and dig a bit deeper into a daily SCRUM meeting. As a lead/manager I must follow the team dynamic and behavior. And at that point we also had more digital tools to manage a software project. So let’s take a look at each rule.

1. What items were completed since the last Scrum Meeting.

To be honest this is a useless topic because by now if you deliver software with teams around the world you need to have a project management and documentation system. Something like Jira and Confluence or alike. So before a meeting I can see the state of tickets in Jira, so I don’t need my team members to tell me again. And as a team member you should always check your Jira tickets before going to a daily Scrum meeting.

2. What issues or blocks have been found that need to be resolved. (The ScrumMaster is a team leader role responsible for resolving the blocks.)

This is an important one and in my opinion the only reason to have a daily Scrum meeting. But I don’t agree there is any need for a Scrum master, I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. In my opinion Agile & Scrum is something a team does, it’s a team effort not a one girl show. In my case as the lead of the team, I was the host of the daily Scrum meeting, I even changed that concept but we will discuss that later.

3. What new assignments make sense for the team to complete until the next daily scrum meeting?

This is a direct result of the previous topic, if there is a member that has an issue, this will probably get a higher priority. Incoming bugs will be a reason to shift the workload and give that bug a higher priority. It depends on the bugs of course because not all bugs have to be solved right away, but that’s another discussion.

So over the years I started to experiment and change the rules of the daily Scrum meeting. I like to experiment, execute, measure and evaluate, so we can decide if the new way works better or not.

Adapting to Change: How COVID Transformed Our Daily Scrum

Lets move forward to COVID, due to managing remote teams for years I always managed my teams this way, even when we were in the same office space. When COVID hit, my team had no issues working from home, to be honest they were even happy that they didn’t have to come to the office. We delivered more features during COVID than before COVID. But we had a complete different understanding of what a daily Scrum meeting is.

Timing is Everything: Finding the Perfect Moment for Your Daily Scrum

We had a developer in the UK, so our daily was at 14:00. But we changed it several times based on the changes the team needed. We did it at 10:00, we tried at 16:00. We even tested written dailies via a separate Slack channel.

The time does not really matter as long as it’s every 24 hours and the ritual is valuable for the team.

Maximizing Impact: Strategies to Enhance Your Daily Scrum

To make the daily Scrum meeting more useful, I aimed to address issues and align with the entire team during the meeting. So instead of telling you have an issue and then have a meeting after the daily about the issue, I proposed to discuss the issue in the daily. I time-box the discussion about issues and I also increased the duration of the daily from 15 min to 30 min.

The benefit of this change was that we discussed issues and came up with solutions as a team. The rule was, that every team member had to give their opinion, this way there would never be situations where people would come back on a team decision.
Now everybody in the team has heard the exact issue and solution. So there is no “lost in translations” issue like you would have when you do a 1–1 meeting after the daily.

Empowering Teams: The Benefits of a Rotating Scrum Host

Everybody has been in a situation where the Scrum master was not on time or not available. And when this happens the meeting has a very slow start and is a bit awkward. So a new rule was introduced to change the host of the daily scrum meeting. The person who got first into the Slack call was the host of the daily and that person made sure everybody spoke, issues and solutions were discussed and agreed upon and actions were divided.

This gave the team ownership and responsibility. As I said before Agile & Scrum is a team effort. By giving each member the opportunity to host the meeting you also have less waiting and awkwardness. Every member knows exactly what has to be done.

Keeping Everyone Informed: The Power of Team Updates

Surprisingly this had a great impact on the team and the team spirit. I updated the team of every meeting I had joined and gave updates about what was decided in that meeting.

This gave the team a 360-view of what happened in the company. The team was always on top of things and never surprised when management made an announcement for example

Extending Daily Scrums for Deeper Connection

When we noticed that COVID would not go away soon, I added another 30 minutes to the daily. Because these 30 minutes were our water cooler moments, we announced this slot with “Chit Chat Time”. In those 30 minutes members could discuss whatever they wanted, video games, series and movies, new technology, struggles at home, private issues, complaints about work or the company, everything was allowed.

I see you frown, but the return of this was huge. The team had developed a close relationship and knew each other well. They knew what every member liked and disliked, when a member was feeling down or had struggles at home. We did more peer programming, everybody helped each other and the mantra was “Get The Job Done” no matter what or when, evenings, nights, weekends even during holidays, and none of the freelancers has ever invoiced an extra hour.

This was the best team I ever had the honor of leading. We worked together for four years with the same members, six of whom were freelancers, ranging from juniors to mediors and seniors.

Conclusion

So over the years I realized that sticking to certain rules was not really beneficial for the team to deliver software. Through experiments and changes I could improve and make the daily more useful.

1. I realized that the time when it was held is not important.
2. By having Jira we could leave the “What have you done yesterday” out of the daily.
3. Discussing each issue in the daily really worked and got the team on top of things and take ownership. There was no “loss in translation” or team members unaware or issues or solutions. The time to resolve an issue was much faster and resulted in more deployments.
4. Everybody was able to provide their solution to the problem or their opinion on proposed solutions. Which improved inclusion and contribution of all members
5. By having a random host of the meeting it gave everyone the opportunity to host, but also made Scrum a real team effort instead of a one girl show.
6. Updating your team about the state of other teams, projects, upcoming changes and management decisions creates a sense of involvement. Your team will not be just a cog in the machine but an essential part of the company.
7. Introducing a water cooler moment of 30 minutes makes your team a real team. They will get to know each other better and collaborate better. It creates better connections between team members and improves communication and shortens discussions.

So there you have it, this is why you are doing Daily Scrum meetings wrong, because there are so many opportunities you miss out on. So whatever you want to do, execute, measure and evaluate.

If you liked what you just read, please let me know in the comments. If you didn’t like it, I welcome your feedback in the comments as well. Let’s talk about it.