Everyone has their own flavor of standups. Some do it standing up. Some do it sitting down. Some do it in a club with a microphone. I’ve never been that brave.
For me, the scrum standup goes like this. I break it into 3 parts.
- Preparation
- Meeting
- Close
Preparation
As you can see, the meeting begins before everyone joins. For me, answering the question “What did I do yesterday” can lead to me missing a few things. So I like to bring a list, written on a 3×5 card of what I did yesterday, what I’m planning on today, and what’s blocking. It helps me to remember, especially if it is the Monday after a weekend. Also, if anyone is out, I print out their standup report so I can read it aloud.
The space
I like to have everyone stand around a circular table, where we have our conference phone. The team members should stand be fairly close together, not HR violation close, but close enough to hear the soft spoken introverts without having to repeat anything. We stand in the team open space, by our task board, whiteboard, burndown chart and our blockers board.
I will call into the conference call a minute or two before the standup begins. My product owner typically will join the call, since she is located off site. Note, it’s a good idea to turn off the conference call feature that makes callers wait for a chairperson. Otherwise, you’ll end up missing a standup one day and no one knows how to dial in the product owner.
For my standups, I actually standup and have all the team standup in the meeting. I find you reach decisions more quickly if you do.
Even though I’m the Scrum Master, I’ll typically stand with the team in the circle. I know Mike Cohn doesn’t, for fear that everyone will report to him, rather than eachother. However, I feel I that I’m a part of standup as much as anyone else, that since I’m asking others what they’ve done yesterday and will do today, I should be held to the same standard, even if it is just going to meetings, filing paperwork and sending emails.
Latecomers
We punish latecomers by making them dance or sing a song. I have yet to have someone sing a song, but have seen some very entertaining dancing (our SDET has graced us with the Madagascar dance “I like to Move It Move It!” a few times.) It’s a gentle way to reinforce that we start on time.
Meeting
During the actual meeting, I’ll ask who would like to start. Rather than start with one person, I find it’s more democratic to let someone who is ready go first.
We’ll go clockwise. Once we tried to go in alternating order, like a pinball machine. It didn’t work. Perhaps if we had a “conch shell” ala Lord of the Flies it would.
What I do during this meeting is very carefully listen to people for any hidden impediments. Things that they are really stuck on, but they just mention it in passing. Jeff Sutherland came to speak to us at a company meeting a while back, and he said, that the most valuable part of standup is the impediments. Even if they are buried in the mass of status, these need to be pulled out and recorded.
Blockers Board
Therefore, I actually have a pile of Post Its, a Sharpie and a block of butcher paper that I use to record impediments during standup. Any impediment that is not resolved by the end of the person’s report (allowing 1 minute to resolve issues max to keep things moving) goes on the “Blockers Board” . This has three columns. Impediment, Who, When. Typically, my impediments just have the name of the impediment (with a note about who reported it on the sticky) and a who (I go through and assign whos after standup). If the impediment will be there for awhile, or it has been there for awhile, I’ll assign a due date to it so there is more impetus to clear it. Occasionally we’ll go a few days with some stale impediments on the board, but the majority usually get cleared by the next standup. This helps individuals, I believe, to feel like there is value to them bringing impediments, because they will be actioned and someone held accountable.
Scrum Master Updating the Blockers Board
Offline Topics
We also record offline topics that come up during the standup on the whiteboard, along with who needs to stay to discuss. Folks are pretty good about taking issues that might extend standup past 15 minutes offline by asking “Can we take that offline”?
Close
After the official standup, I’ll excuse the product owner and go through any outstanding impediments on the Blockers Board. Usually, I’ll tear off quite a few, but the ones that stay get a star so we can track how stale they are. Then, we’ll ask those who need to stay for offline topics to stay. If we are good, we’ll have kept the meeting to 15 minutes. If we are bad, we’ll have dragged on a few minutes after, but that is not so bad, as long as it doesn’t happen too often. If it does, people are de-energized by standup and do not leave feeling like they got something out of the meeting.
I’ve toyed around with the idea of ending with a catchy phrase like “let’s go get things done!” or “I love it when a plan comes together”. Maybe I’ll try this tomorrow.