Standups: how we did it in my team.
Hint: You don’t need to agree with all of these but these practices helped us be more effective during the daily standup.
And what did they say about standups if you are doing Agile delivery? For me, it is not a ritual that we ‘need’ to do but it is an opportunity for the wider team (not only the Devs) to:
- Visualize the planned scope of work
- Discuss work in progress
- Rethink if we are on target to achieve the target goals
- Surface blockers and also offer/ask for help
What a standup is not:
- A place for a status update to management
- Not for detail brainstorming
- Not an opportunity to point finger at issues
Though there are certain prescriptions about what makes agile standups efficient and effective, one of the basic principles of being Agile is also to adapt it to what works for the team. Below, I will talk briefly about how we did our standups and how we made is more interesting and effective.
Daisy “Guys, I have a meeting from 10.30. Can we move our stand up a bit?”
Dirk “Uh … I have a meeting in the morning, then the standup. By the time I finish it, it would be about time for lunch”
Gyanesh “After the whole day, I am so tired now … just wanna go home”
We did it first thing in the morning!
- Keep the time of the standup fixed so we are disciplined to participate.
- Yesterday is fresh in our memory, so we can talk about how I went but also the outcomes from the standup can help plan the rest of the day.
- Do it before the day gets busy with other meetings where you get tired and/or distracted.
- Everyone’s participation as a team is critical.
We have situations where we are working with geographically distributed teams and it may not be always possible to have it first thing in the morning. But at least we can try to work out a time that is convenient to all and that is fixed.
Daisy “Gyanesh, today it is your turn”
Gyanesh “Damn, can’t think of anything”
Dirk “OK... I watched a movie over the weekend. Interesting one … I will do the charade today”
Have an energizer.
- Sometimes the team members have just arrived at the office, getting to their desks or still trying to gather their thoughts.
- Having a quick energizer is a great idea to make us laugh and start the day together.
- We used to have quick dumb charade to start the day. My wife’s team has a fun quiz to start their stand-up.
Scrum master “Well, guys let us start the stand-up. I will open the JIRA board. Dirk, so can you talk us through your cards — how are we going?”
In the covid world “rest of the team has video off and not interested in Dirk’s cards”.
We are quite likely familiar with scenarios where one person, typically the scrum master, is responsible to run the standups every day. In my experience, in such teams where it is the responsibility of one individual alone to run the show — makes standup a ‘ritual’ that is not owned by the team, that is not participated actively by the team and done not because of the value it offers but the sentiment is more that it is needed ‘by the scrum master’ or by the organizational processes.
You can argue that a lot of such behavior could be cultural and there are potentially other things going on, but I am as much confident, that when we collectively own this responsibility to facilitate in the standup — we contribute more actively and responsively.
Facilitating the standup is a team ‘ownership’
- As a team manager, I seldom ran stand-ups. I facilitated when my turn came as per the ‘Algorithm’ the team had.
- The algorithm was ‘whoever won the charade would nominate anyone at random’ to facilitate the standup that morning.
- In our team, our Product Manager, Sr Delivery Manager, or anyone could get to facilitate the standup.
Daisy “I had a look at our SLO dashboard, and we have one service that had some issues last night. I would like to create a card and investigate”
John “Can we talk about what happened so we can prioritize, appropriately?”
Discuss anything that impacts our deliveries and progress.
What I did yesterday? What I will do today? What are my blockers?
Like most of us, I had started my Agile journey with Scrum. Someone taught us these are the things we ‘must’ talk about during the stand-up. They are definitely helpful to keep the standup focussed, but we largely didn’t follow the template in our team.
For us, the standup was about visualizing progress and surfacing anything that mattered to the team and the deliverables. So, while we didn’t strictly maintain this format of discussion, we talked about the cards in play, why a card is there longer, what is blocking, and anything else that mattered and/or affected the deliverables.
Leaves. Training. API changes and so on …
Sometimes our standups didn’t fit the 15 mins slot but how we brought that in control is another story.
John “Who is walking the wall today. I nominate Dirk”
Dirk “OK man. Let us start from the In Progress column. Anything that we have finished and can be put to Done?”
Daisy “My card, can we move it to Done. I had a chat with Laila and we are good.”
Dirk “OK thanks, Daisy. John, this card has been in progress for 3 days already? How are we progressing, do you need any help?”
As we started in our team, we did the standard practice that everyone else followed for stand-ups. What I did yesterday, what I will do today and what are my blockers. But we noticed this approach caused few issues:
- Team members repeated similar things “I attended the same meetings like everyone else” types
- Team members only cared when their cards were discussed and tended to zone out when other cards were getting talked about
We practiced the ‘Wall Walk’
- The wall walk helped the whole team talk through all the cards, thus everyone had to know the details of each deliverable.
- It helped us not repeat updates but focus on what mattered about the tasks in hand.
- As we moved the cards to done we made it a point to refer to the DoD.
Read more about ‘wall walk’ here: https://medium.com/serious-scrum/walking-the-board-on-daily-scrum-5b468c760329
Dirk “BTW, I also needed some help with the technical design on how to implement the data synch”
Michael “So what are you thinking about the design. What strategies are you thinking?”
Parking lot
This would be the right time for the facilitator to interject and remind the team that this is not the right place for brainstorming or detailed technical discussion. So, we can add the topic to the parking lot so that relevant team members can discuss it later.
Who attended our stand-ups:
I have experienced teams where stakeholders were not invited so that the internal discussions or issues are actually not surfaced outside the team. The intention was to ensure that internal details remained within the team and a ‘curated’ status is made available to ‘people outside of the team’. I would imagine that standup is to visualize the progress and blockers, and if the team is trying to hide them, then they probably lack a safe environment to talk about them.
In our case, we primarily had the usual suspects — Team members, Team Manager (me), Product Manager, Principal Developer but we did invite a few others occasionally who had a stake in a particular piece of work. For example, during a specific deliverable, we had the account managers invited to our stand-up. We do agree that we should have fewer people in the stand-up so we don’t digress and keep the standup focused. Having the stakeholders in the standup meant we could get feedback immediately. This also provided the opportunity to parts of the organization who necessarily don’t use Agile/Kanban/Scrum in their daily life to experience our ways of working.
Some thoughts before you part:
- Have a discipline of time and attendance.
- Make it fun.
- Make it collectively owned by the team.
- Anyone who has a stake in the deliverable could be invited to the standup.
- Surface the blockers and discuss a plan forward to resolve those.
