5 Best Practices for Running a Daily Standup Meeting
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Are your daily scrums actually a daily slog? If so, you’re not alone. Even though these meetings are essential to scrum methodology, most agile teams could do without them completely.
These meetings are supposed to be a chance for the team to meet, check in with each other, and spot any problems before they become massive blockers. However, the meeting often becomes the blocker.
Is it time to scrap daily scrums? Absolutely not. You simply need to fix them. This blog will outline the most common problems with daily scrums and give you ways to avoid them.
The Problem(s) With Most Daily Standup Meetings
Before we get into the solution, we need to deconstruct the problem.
If you ask agile teams in most sectors, they may simply tell you that daily scrums are boring or a waste of time. However, we need to get to the root of why they feel that way.
In most cases, agile teams really feel that daily scrums:
Take them away from “real” work.
Are often dominated by one person, in most cases the scrum master.
Can turn into a brag-fest or blame-fest.
Put too much pressure on developers to produce something daily, robbing them of the freedom to experiment.
Waste time with complaints that would be better saved for the retrospective when the increment is over.
Often happen at inconvenient times, too early in the morning or a time that takes them out of “the zone” working.
Force team members to talk to the scrum master (who is often also the manager), instead of talking to each other.
Feel like a form of micromanagement.
As a result, most people either feel that their daily scrums are at best a necessary evil, or at worst… they’re simply the worst.
Now how can we fix that?
5 Best Practices for Effective Daily Standups
1) Don’t get comfortable
Daily standup meetings are called that for a reason — so, stand up! If everyone sits and becomes too relaxed, the meeting may run over time, and team members might start getting distracted.
2) Focus on three main topics
There are ideally three main points of discussion that a team should at least touch on during the meetings, which are:
What has already been done?
What needs to be done?
What challenges are we currently facing?
In addition, your team can also talk about what will need to be done later down the line, but that’s not necessary. If the focus isn’t on the three main topics, then the meeting can easily go south and run the risk of being too long.
Also, try not to work on other tasks while the meeting is going on. The sprint ceremony should be the only priority while it is happening and should be kept as short as possible
3) Keep remote team members in the loop
Protect meeting equity! Team members working remotely can still bring valuable input even though they aren’t in the same room… and yet they often feel left out.
It can be time-consuming to set up a voice or video call, so using a digital workspace to involve remote workers is the best option for this type of meeting.
For example, Stormboard allows remote employees to contribute to a meeting and see what is going on in real-time so everyone can be included.
4) Get in a routine
If you hold your daily standup meetings every day, try not to skip a day (unless there is an emergency or issue). Missing a meeting may throw your team out of the routine and derail the scrum process, which may end up hurting the project being worked on.
Routines are great for teams who are working within a structured agile methodology because sticking to the process leads to the ideal outcome for your product or project. If meetings are held at a different time each day or week, it will throw off the whole team.
5) Get visual with a meeting software tool
If you are using conventional meeting practices, the results from your Standup might get lost before they can be acted on. At the same time, a lack of visibility into cross-team dependencies can rob you of the ability to see the big picture, or spot potential conflicts before they become sprint-stopping problems.
Instead, try a meeting software tool or digital whiteboard that syncs to your backlog tool. That way, everyone on your team has a total visual representation of cross-team dependencies, what everyone is working on, and how their work impacts everyone else.
At the same time, this gives your remote workers equal footing, as they have full access to your board. They can see, add, and remove items just as easily as anyone on-site.
How Stormboard can help
Stormboard is the meeting hero. Our software provides users with agile ceremony templates that can be applied to a Storm (your digital workspace) and shared with anyone in a team.
And of course, we have a pre-made daily standup template!
Your team members can add ideas on virtual sticky notes, edit at the same time, move things around, add Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents, and even chat with each other. All of this is done in real-time and is saved to the cloud, so there is no worrying whether work will get saved or not.
Most importantly, when you sync your backlog tool (we have full integration with Rally, Jira, and Azure DevOps) for daily scrums, we eliminate the need for double entry. For example, there is no need to make a change in Stormboard and then make the same change to the backlog in Jira. Both tools are synced and updated in real-time.
Your entire team gets a full view and simple visual representation of all cross-team dependencies, ensuring that everyone is truly on the same page. This can help you simplify your daily scrums, slash the time they take up during the day, and re-engage your team.
But don’t take our word for it. Sign up right now and see how it can help you.
Originally posted Feb.11, 2019
*Updated on Jun.17, 2024
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