As Agilists, we all do standups. Three questions. What did you do since the last standup? What will you do before the next one? Do you have any impediments? And maybe a fourth: Do I need to have a parking lot conversation after the standup about anything?
Or at least, we all try to do them. Oftentimes, we run into difficulties. Sometimes the scrum master tries to lead the standup, and take reports. Sometimes the standup turns into a set of conversations. Sometimes the team drones on. Sometimes even the scrum master is unable to prevent herself from asking questions of the folks reporting.
Is there anything that can be done about these problems? Funny you should ask.
In the last few months we’ve seen a few interesting experiments tried in our standups. The simplest standard experiment in standup is to choose a talking token, and to require that the only person who gets to talk is the one with the talking token. In general, this is a good practice, and if the standup has any tendency to revert to conversation rather than a short team-to-team reporting, the talking token is a generically good idea.
A step in that direction that went very well for some of our teams over the last year occurred when trying to get remote workers to report /participate during the standup. We ended up having difficulties getting the polycom system to work so we ended up using a cell-phone, and calling the shared number. Then, the person reporting would hold the cellphone, and speak into it, allowing the remote worker(s) to hear what was being said. As a side effect, it was among the most well-obeyed talking tokens I’ve seen.
A different step in that direction came up when one of our most conscientious scrum masters found that she couldn’t prevent herself from asking questions during standup, and also determined that not everyone was following the rules. Her response was to print up a set of four index cards, each with one of the 3+1 questions on it. The new rule on that team is: not only can you not talk unless you’re holding the deck of cards, but you also can only talk about what card you’re showing. It makes standups extremely focused.
Also, because one of our standup’s quality metrics is that we do 4-days a week of correct standup behavior, that same team has Cowboy fridays, in which they do a 90% correct standup, but relax a little bit, and allow themselves to not follow the rules perfectly.
But the last experiment may be the best. An awful lot of scrum teams have a difficulty with just yammering on during the standup, rather than talking about what tasks they accomplished, and what tasks they will be working on. The trick we’ve recently tried to address this concern (besides the normal bribery and threats) is to attempt silent standups.
The rules: Do your standup correctly, but no spoken words (or sign language). Move tasks, from WIP to complete, from not started to WIP, or update their hours. Also, write up impediments, and parking lot items into the right locations. We’ve tried a few. They are incredibly good at forcing the team back to the task-focused nature of the standups. Might be the best experiment we’ve tried related to standups. Also, silent standups end up being really short. A modification would be to just do Today/Tomorrow silent, and allow impediments and parking lot items to be vocalized.
While I wouldn’t suggest that silent becomes the norm, doing it once every week or two really reminds teams to focus on talking to tasks, skip talking if they have nothing to say, and to put tasks up that are being missed in normal discussion.
What else have you seen work to make standups better?