This is part of Seven habits of highly effective scrum-teams, a book in seven parts about scrum for teams.

First habit: make the most of stand-ups

‘Hey, shouldn’t we have a stand-up?’

‘O well, you know what I’m doing right now, don’t you?’

‘Wait a second, this is a very complex bit. Can we do it in half an hour?’

‘Where’s Alice?’ ‘She’s in another meeting.’

‘And Bob?’ ‘He’s not in yet. It’s only ten o’clock!’

The daily stand-up is perhaps the most visible part of scrum. Every day the team gathers around the scrum board, and have a short meeting standing up. Indeed, some call it the daily scrum. But why is it important?

Because communication is important. For a team to work together, each member must know what each other member is doing. And not just have a general idea what they are doing, but know it fairly precisely. That way, you can help each other; you don’t do double work; and you don’t do work that isn’t actually necessary.

That’s the textbook theory. But are your stand-ups effective? Do you feel it is working for you?

Be on time

A fairly common sight: six people standing in front of a scrum board, waiting for the seventh to arrive. After five minutes, the team is complete and the stand-up can start. Ten minutes later the product owner leaves, because she has another meeting. ‘I’m really sorry, but I have to attend that meeting.’ This is actually justified, because the meeting is running late. The product owner leaves. The team tries to pick up the meeting, but where were they? Who was talking? The stand-up meeting is only halfway.

If you have a very short meeting, it must start on time. Else you can never end on time. But also, people arriving late are much less disruptive than people leaving early. When you’re leaving early, you usually have a good reason to do so: another meeting, an appointment, something to prepare or something to finish. But arriving late is your fault, so you will try to sneak in and not draw too much attention.

Apart from that, people will get used to meetings starting late very fast, and will not bother to come early if the meeting never starts on time. But luckily, people will also get used quickly to meetings starting sharp on time. Starting on time is a habit that will re-inforce itself: after some time nobody will dare to come late anymore.

It takes too long!

Initially, stand-up meetings often take longer than fifteen minutes. It’s hard to concentrate any longer, people start to look around or out of the window, some people even sit down. Soon the meeting isn’t a standup meeting anymore; the subject of the meeting is fuzzy, not all members of the team participate. It has become an open ended, purposeless meeting that does not result in action items or information exchange. No wonder people complain about scrum’s many meetings…

A good stand-up meeting never runs late. It doesn’t have to. The key is to realize what a stand-up is all about: to make the whole team aware of what everyone in the team is doing. Not less, because this certainly is a lot to talk about; but not more either. When the sprint progresses, stand-up meetings can become shorter and shorter. There are a few tricks to keep your stand-up meetings as short as possible, (but not shorter.)

Stick to the three questions

The three questions that the team members answer in a stand-up meeting are:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. What are my impediments?

… or ‘Done’, ‘To do’, ‘Blockers’. It often happens that the team starts discussing those items instead of just listening to it. Although a small amount of discussion can be useful, to clarify what’s done or going to be done, you can take long discussions outside the meeting. A simple ’shall we discuss this after the meeting?’ will do. And probably not everyone wants to be in that follow-up meeting.

A stand-up meeting is meant to note what’s going on, not to solve it. If necessary, keep a list of all things that need to be discussed after the meeting, so that you don’t forget. But especially if there are so many things that you need a list, you shouldn’t try to discuss it all in the stand-up meeting…

Be prepared

There is nothing worse than hearing ‘… now what did I do yesterday, …’ or ‘I’ve just got in and not had time to work out what I will be doing today…’ in a stand-up meeting. Make sure you know what you are going to say. It will also free up your mind to listen to others if you don’t have to dig into your memory instead.

The ball

If lots of discussing happens and lots of people are talking at the same time, it might help to use a token, such as a ball (anything will do, from a small rugby ball to a large beach ball.) He or she who holds the ball may speak, everybody else must shut up and listen. Everybody can request the ball, of course, but the person holding the ball will pass it on.

Order, don’t order

Using a ball will also make sure the order in which the team speaks is logical, if the member who is done passes it on to the next ‘logical’ person, e.g. the one he teamed up with, or the one that works on the same user story. This will make it easier to follow the meeting.

One particular pitfall that should be avoided is the scrum master asking the next person to speak. This isn’t a status report to the scrum master, this is a meeting for the team. I once saw a scrum master pointing to team members, saying ‘You!’, expecting them to say their thing. That didn’t work very well.

If the team speaks in logical order, there will be a natural ‘flow’ to the meeting, and it will also be clear when it’s over. If you want to speak a ‘parting word’ (e.g. because you have your birthday and brought cake) you can always request the ball one more time at the end.

Talk to the team

Actually, the team shouldn’t be talking to the scrum master at all; after all, the team is not reporting about their progress. You should talk to the whole team. The scrum master doesn’t have to say anything, unless he or she wants to tell anything about impediments, or demo schedules, or other things that he or she did for the team. The scrum master is not the team’s leader or manager: the scrum master is the team’s helper.

I’ve also seen team members standing in front of the board with their back to the rest of the team, moving stickies and telling the board what they did. At least, it looked as if they told the board, but the board wasn’t all that interested. Again, you need to speak to the team. If this is happening a lot, you could agree with the team not to move or touch any stickies during the stand-up meeting. That also forces people to explain a bit better what they actually mean. Instead of saying ‘I did this one, and that one, and today I’ll take on this one’, they’ll have to really describe the task.

Meeting by phone

If you read through all the advice, you will realize it is very difficult to have a stand-up meeting with a distributed team. If it is hard to have an effective meeting when you meet in person, it is even harder to do when half of the team is inside a little electronic box on the table. Video conferencing with large screens is better, but still some extra caution is necessary.

Some tips when meeting by phone:

• Don’t gather around the phone and talk to it; gather around the board as usual, and have the phone ‘participate’.
• Talk to the team, not to the phone. The people around you are as important as the people on the other side of the line.
• ‘Be on time’ is vital. Phone conferences get a very vague and ineffective feel if people come and go.
• ‘Be prepared’ is even more important when you meet by phone. When you meet in person and somebody struggles to remember you can see that and make a joke about it. When it happens over the phone, you miss the visual cue and it is much more irritating.

All in all you should try to get the same quick and clear communication going in the phone meeting as in a normal meeting. It should probably even be better, as you have much less chance to talk to each other during the day. Never forget that there is nothing like meeting in person.

Listen

Now the hard part. When another team member has the ball, listen to what she says. Don’t just hear the words: listen, understand, remember. If you cannot explain after the meeting what everyone is working on, you didn’t listen.

If you don’t understand what someone is talking about, ask to clarify it. If you still don’t understand, but everybody else seems to understand it, ask for a little extra time outside the meeting for more explanation. You never know, others may want to hear that explanation as well.

Why is this so important? It’s not just to be polite. To work together as a team, you can’t expect other team members to do their mystery bits while you are doing yours. After all, it will all have to fit in the end. So to understand the whole picture, to save people from doing double work, and to prevent people from doing useless work, the whole team will have to be involved. And if the whole team really listens during the stand-up meeting, they will be.

Note that it is hard to listen that well. In the beginning, you will not understand everything. Stand-up meetings will take long because a lot of explanation is needed. But gradually, it will become easier, while everyone in the team is learning. And finally you will have those clear, short stand-up meetings where a maximum amount of information is exchanged in a minimum of time: a highly effective stand-up meeting.

Next chapter: Second habit: look back!