Effective Daily Stand Up Meetings

 

A few weeks ago one of my customers asked me for advice about daily standup meetings (also called Scrum meetings, morning meetings, or better yet coordination meetings).  Her feeling was that her teams could become more disciplined in their approach to coordination meetings so she asked if it would be possible to see how teams in other companies run their meetings.  I indicated that there are a lot of good videos on YouTube and that I would write something up soon in a blog posting.  So here goes.

1. Put your meeting strategy on the wall.  Put the rules (see below) on the wall in the space where you hold your coordination meetings.  If you have virtual meetings online, capture them there (in a wiki for example).  We call things like this information radiators in agile.
2. Coach people.  It takes time to build up effective meeting skills.  At first you’ll want to coach people publicly within the team so that everyone can learn.  After awhile, if someone is still struggling (perhaps they’re often late to the meeting or aren’t sufficiently focused) you may want to coach them privately.
3. Call it a coordination meeting.  Terms such as “stand up meeting” or “Scrum meeting” aren’t very clear, but “coordination meeting” is.  By using clear terminology you make your expectations regarding the purpose of the meeting crystal clear, thereby reducing the chance for confusion.
4. Set some rules.  As a team, discuss what how you intend to run these meetings.  Potential rules you should consider adopting include:

• Arrive on time.  ‘Nuff said.
• One person talks at a time.  There shouldn’t be side conversations going on, not only is that disrespectful it results in those people being distracted from coordinating with the rest of the team.
• Come prepared.  As a meeting participant you need to know how you’re going to answer each question before you get into the meeting.
• Define what you want to discuss.  There are many different questions or issues that you can discuss in coordination meetings.  Scrum suggests “What did you do yesterday?”, “What will you do today?”, and “What’s blocking you?”.  Other questions could be “What did you learn today?”, “What will potentially block you?”, “What value did you deliver since the last meeting?” and many others. 
• Someone different leads each day.  A common strategy is to rotate the responsibility of running coordination meetings between team members.  This is a great learning experience for some people and certainly helps everyone to recognize how these meetings could be run more effectively.
• Stay focused.  The goal is to coordinate as a team, and the easiest way to do so is for everyone to focus on that goal.  So stay off your phone, don’t be reading email, don’t be holding side conversations, and only focus on the issues/questions you’ve agreed to as a team.
• Stand at first.  Having people stand up tends to keep meetings short but can prove to be artificial (I’ve been on coordination calls where people working from home or other locations have been asked to stand, yikes). 
• Coordinate around a task board.  When you gather around a task board much of the status information that you may want to communicate to the meeting is provided by the task board itself.  This provides opportunity to streamline your meeting process.

Here’s a few interesting videos that I found on YouTube:

1. How to Hold a Daily Standup. This short video provides several good tips for holding a standard “Scrum meeting”.  It suggests that people answer the three standard Scrum questions so take that advice with a grain of salt.  And the background music is a bit cheesy although fun.
2. Agile Simulation Part 20: The Daily Standup.  This video is interesting because it starts with a dysfunctional version of the meeting and then shows an effective one.  The common mistakes the video shows include running it like a status meeting instead of a coordination meeting; people coming to the meeting unprepared; discussing inappropriate issues during the meeting; showing up late to the meeting; having side conversations; one person was basically checked out and was lying down on a bean bag chair; and a non-team member started driving the conversation at one point.
3. How a Lean Thinking Company Runs a Morning Meeting. This video overviews the approach taken by an organization’s leadership team to their morning meeting.  They look at their task board, a whiteboard with stickies.  They’ve tailored their meeting to reflect the needs of what they need to coordinate, and in the video they discuss how they came to putting this meeting together.  It’s interesting to note that they are in multiple locations, so they video conference daily.
4. Lean, the Morning Meeting at Fastcap. This is another non-software development example.  This team explicitly changes the leader of the morning meeting each day to help them grow their skills.  One of the things I like about this video is that their focus is to share critical information with each other.  This includes mistakes, learnings, and any improvements that they made.  The overriding goal is to focus on learning, team building, and to celebrate their successes.
5. Dodgy Scrum StandUp. This video was purposely put together to show many of the bad habits that people may exhibit during daily stand ups.  These bad habits included not staying on topic; getting into details that most people don’t need to hear; and asking questions around implementation details instead of taking the discussion offline.  One person even threw something at another person, thereby distracting the group.  Another person showed up late, disrupting the discussion.  The team also didn’t refer to their task board (I assume that it was the task board behind people on the left hand side of the screen).