When a team starts living the values of commitment, courage, focus, openness and respect, the three pillars of empiricism namely transparency, inspection, and adaptation rise high and help promote more trust within the team. Successful use of Scrum depends on individuals who embody these five principles more efficiently.
Scrum has provides us with few of the best alternatives which help reduce the overall need for redundant meetings. This iterative and incremental agile process frameworks which is lightweight help manage complex work with bare minimum meetings generally known as Scrum Ceremonies.
Although scrum hosts these five key ceremonies which helps it adapt an evidence-based empirical approach. This post is to take you through one such ceremony and help you understand the importance of it.
- Product Backlog Refinement
- Daily Scrum Meeting
- Sprint Planning
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
A stand-up meeting is also known as DSM, Daily Scrum, Daily Huddle or Agile circle. It is a short meeting used to keep teams aligned throughout their work on a daily basis. The sole purpose of a stand-up meeting is to clarify goals and priorities, discuss potential roadblocks, and actually talk as a team about the work being done. Daily Scrum has a well-defined and constant structure where every team member should answer the three main questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What will I do today?
- Do I see any impediment?
However in this rapidly changing world where change is the only constant thing, following the same monotonous routine might result in lack of interest in team to join this ceremony. To keep up the energy levels high and ensure an active participation, Scrum Master as a facilitator may pitch in and help bring variations to the DSM ensuring the key Mantra is being followed “KEEP IT SHORT, OR TAKE IT OFFLINE”
Here by I will share few ways I have used to break the anti-patterns and make the daily interesting.
Follow the routine but break the order
Don’t always go consecutively around a circle. Get the current speaker to select the next person to speak, randomly. Let the cycle go on until the last person. “Roll Call”.
Another way to do this is by rotating the facilitator. It has helped as it brings a different flavor to the daily and ensures it doesn’t turn out to be a status meeting.
Make it light and playful
Playing sounds when somebody takes longer could also be a fun factor and helps in time boxing.
Catch the ball n speak as it gives an angle of gamification.
Change the roles / speak for somebody else
Catch the breaches
Asking the team to focus on flow instead of sharing a status helps understand where we are heading and identifies roadblocks if any.
Keep improvement backlog where teammates can add in daily observations which further can be discussed in Retro to be actioned upon
Some teams like the “dollar in the jar” or “get us the cake” technique for breaches of teams working agreement. Nonetheless, here the peer pressure triggers the donations to the jar, rather than the scrum master or any other representative in management pointing out transgressions and demanding payment because this might turn out to be an escalation operation
Similarly, multiple fun factors can be incorporated to make these ceremonies interesting TIME BOXING is the key mantra and we as the guardians of scrum need to ensure that daily is not extended over 15 minutes in any case.