How Agile Teams Can Make The Most Of Daily Scrum Meetings

Show:

June 10, 2021 Programming

Agile teams have many tasks during project development, and one of which is the daily scrum meetings. While meeting connotes a long and boring lecture from your supervisors, daily scrum meetings aren’t. With this type of meeting, the duration is brief, and everyone can share their thoughts. That’s because time is essential in every Agile project.

What Are Scrum Meetings?

Whatever role you have in an Agile project, it’s vital to understand what scrum meetings are. This will help you become more engaged during your daily scrum meetings. With such, scrum meetings or standups are where you check the progress of your sprint goal by standing. Since standing for too long is uncomfortable, it makes sure that the meeting won’t stretch too long. However, if the meeting stretches for too long, it doesn’t serve the purpose of scrum meetings.

Ways To Maximize Daily Scrum Meetings

You can avoid wasting scrum meetings or making them longer than usual. When you maximize your daily scrum meetings, then you can do more. Thus, you may want to consider the following ways:

1. Prepare

Whatever your role is in the Agile team, you need to prepare before attending the scrum meeting. Especially if you’re the scrum master, you must come prepared and set an example. You can become a successful scrum master when you show how a scrum meeting should go.

Thus, you must have the following information, depending on your scrum’s schedule for the day:

Where you are to achieve your goals aligned with the Agile project
The processes you use to adapt, identify, or review the progress of your goals
List of tasks you need to perform daily
Other concerns that your team may need to know can affect the overall progress of your project

When you come prepared, you can ensure that the flow of the meeting is smooth. Your team members will also be encouraged to do the same. Since they see the value of preparation, they’ll become more engaged and focused during daily scrum meetings.

Most importantly, your team members will also appreciate the project’s progress since they know everyone’s contribution matters. In addition, they’ll be informed whether the team is in sync, even if everyone has a different role.

2. Talk About The Blockers

As the name suggests, blockers are the ones stopping you from finishing a task or goal. These may include personal limitations, team dependencies, or technical limitations. Knowing each member’s blockers, you can ask for solutions from members who’ve experienced such blockers. Thus, not only will you be solving your issue, but, in the future, other team members may know what to do when they experience such.

You can also use scrum meetings to list down all hindrances that each member encounters. Since the meeting is a short one, the problems don’t need to be solved right away. Make this another topic for another day. Or, you can schedule a time to solve such issues for each member without wasting everyone’s time. You may even want to involve other departments that need to handle the issue.

For instance, a colleague can’t go forward because they need to wait for a team’s output. Check the other department why this is so, and what should be better ways to improve such.

3. Allow Time Consistency

To keep your team members engaged, you may want to set a regular time to hold a daily meeting. Avoid waiting for latecomers; instead, start promptly. By doing this, your team members will know that you’re serious about your short meetings.

However, it’s best to think about your members’ convenience as well. If you’re working in a physical office, you may have regular office working hours. Thus, it may be best to have the meeting before the start of work. But, if you’re working virtually, then it may be best to check on the other team’s working hours as most virtual workers have time differences.

By having a set time, you can be sure that you’ve come prepared, resulting in not wasting anyone’s time.

4. Be Visual

Another way to get the most of your daily scrum meetings is to have everyone accountable using a scrum board. Here, you can write each member’s daily updates for everyone to see. In addition, the iteration board should complement the daily meetings as it should have concrete tasks or stories from each member.

If you’re in a virtual team, you may want to use tools or software to enter each member’s updates. This must be accessible to everyone so they can put a ‘done’ mark on their tasks. By having a board to check on their daily tasks, the team can understand what they need to focus on for the day. That’s because the concept of ‘done’ is clear and defined.

Moreover, some members are more engaged because they can share their accomplishments visually even without them talking about them. This may even make them more encouraged to accomplish more tasks related to their goal of the day.

5. Have Your Team Talk About Their Work

As mentioned, members have different tasks. Thus, make scrum meetings an opportunity to make each member understand their colleagues’ roles. You may want to talk about your updates or backlogs. Using the iteration board, they can visually point to their tasks while speaking about them. They may be in a bulleted form and the like, making it easier for others to follow.

And, since they’re sharing it with everyone, other colleagues can point out if the task is within the member’s scope. Sometimes, there are similar tasks that two or more members are working on at the same time. When the team knows what each is working on, they can avoid providing the same outputs.

Conclusion

Whatever you call them, scrum meetings will allow each member to share their current, previous, and future tasks with the team. By knowing what each member is working on, you can visualize where they are in the project. You can also understand if your team is near the accomplishment stage or still needs more work done. Moreover, a daily huddle also ensures that the team is motivated to accomplish even small tasks to attain a bigger goal.