Daily Standups: Facilitation Essentials With Agilonomics

How to facilitate effective daily standups

Are your Daily standups routine, boring and unproductive?  Daily stand-ups are a hot topic in the world of scrum and often create a sense of controversy. It’s not uncommon for teams to struggle with the purpose and frequency of these meetings. Some team members may feel uncomfortable with the daily routine, while others may be unclear on how to effectively run the stand-ups. It seems that everyone has their own thoughts and opinions on how these meetings should be conducted. But don’t let the differing viewpoints confuse you! In this article, we’ll dive into all aspects of the daily stand-up and discover simple rules that will help in facilitating effective daily stand-ups more successful. 4 Rules for Agile teams to make their daily standups effective Rule 1: Same time, same place One important rule of daily stand-ups is to have them at the same time and in the same place. Consistency is key! Imagine if you had to attend a daily meeting and its time and location changed randomly. Even if you added it to your calendar, you would probably still miss a few of them.  This is because human beings naturally do best with rhythm and it can be seen in all aspects of our lives. Imagine yourself taking a train or ride at the same time and same place daily and that it changed randomly due to a number of reasons. How would you feel about it? Frustrated? Rushed? Missed reaching work on time? Feeling that the organizers and owners of the ride service should stretch out of their comfort zone, make standard rule and expect everyone to abide by those rules, right? Remember, people have busy schedules and multiple commitments in their work and personal lives. What helps us human beings is to establish a rhythm with things that are routine.  So, to avoid disruption and ensure maximum participation, it’s best to stick to the same time and place for these meetings. Make sure everyone knows the schedule and adds it to their calendars. This will help everyone stay on track and attend the meetings regularly. Rule2: Start on time ” Starting daily standups on time is crucial for their effectiveness. “ This is because if you allow team members who are running late to dictate the start time, it sets a wrong precedent that can continue in the future. To ensure daily standups start on time, set working agreements and expect team members to adhere to them. Here’s one example from my experience. I was Scrum Master for a team where team members were consistently late for daily standups. To solve this, I brought it up in a retrospective and we agreed on some rules.  The team decided that while the standup was scheduled for 10:00 AM, we would actually start at 10:02 AM to allow a two-minute buffer for team members to settle in. If someone arrived after 9:03 or later, they would put $1 in a piggy bank, which we called the food fund.  This fund was meant to grow until we had around $20, at which point we would go to Starbucks together. This incentive worked, and the food fund stopped growing as people became more conscious of not losing their $1 on a regular basis. Another example is from Mike Cohn, who used to hand a heavy ball to each team member while providing their plans and updates. The “heavy” ball would create a sense of discomfort and members avoided long conversations while talking In one team I was coaching, the manager and product owner took a more stringent approach. He set a rule where if a team member was one minute late, they would put $1 in the piggy bank, two minutes late would result in $2, and three minutes or more would result in $3.  One team member was unfazed by the $1 penalty, but when he started putting $3 in the piggy bank every day, he soon started running out of dollar bills and eventually started coming on time. These are just a few examples of how to start daily standups on time and ensure focused participation. Rule 3: Keep till 15 minutes One of the reasons many team members have a negative view towards daily standup meetings is due to the fact that if not managed effectively, they can easily exceed the allotted time. In my experience, I have seen daily standup meetings go on for over 45 minutes, or even an hour, which can frustrate team members who would rather focus on completing their work. To make sure this doesn’t happen, it’s important to understand the purpose of daily standups. These meetings are not for team members to give updates to their manager or the scrum master, but rather a time for the team to self-organize and plan their work for the next 24 hours. It’s also a time to call out any impediments and ask for help. The three rules mentioned earlier can have a positive impact on daily standups if they are implemented effectively and understood properly. However, if they are not, it can often be a result of the prevalent culture within the team or the entire organization. Format of the daily standup When it comes to the format of effective daily standup meetings, there has been some debate around the use of the three traditional questions.  While some Agile practitioners believe these questions are too limited and can stifle creativity, I believe that they can be a useful starting point, especially for new teams that are just starting with Scrum. Additionally, even for high-performing teams, these questions can be of value as long as they help the team regularly track its progress through the sprint. What is important? Standups should be purposeful, allowing the team to plan their work for the next 24 hours and to call out any impediments that need to be resolved. The standup should be kept short and focused, avoiding going over time and wasting valuable working hours. Instead of outright rejecting the three questions, I suggest that

Why sprint reviews are hard?

Why Sprint Reviews Are So Hard ?

As we know, there are four main Scrum ceremonies: Sprint Planning, Daily Stand up, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. Additionally, we also groom or refine the backlog (Backlog Refinement) which happens throughout the Sprint. The Sprint Review is second to last ceremony in the Sprint. The purpose of the Sprint Review is for an Agile team to show their product increment to the Product Owner and business stakeholders. The idea is, for the team to demo their product increment, features or functionalities and engage the audience in conversation to understand how they feel about it, what they like or dislike about it, what they think is still lacking etc. In the course of this conversation, the team gets valuable feedback, which they use to improve the product in subsequent iterations. Among all the Scrum ceremonies, the one that appears to be the weakest or least effective is the Sprint Review. There are many reasons why Agile teams struggle organizing effective Sprint Reviews. 1. The most critical reason is the inability of Agile teams to create their product keeping the big picture in mind. If one looks at the Product Backlog Items (PBI) of most Agile teams, they will not be surprised  to see that many of those items, called “Stories”, do not give any value to the end user or customer. Even combining a few of these stories does not give much value. Having finished these components, the team demonstrates those bits and pieces to the business stakeholders. Not only is this boring for the audience, they also do not  see much value in it. Imagine somebody is designing and creating a beautiful table, but only shows one leg and half of the top to potential buyers at an agreed upon date. Would you be excited to buy such a product? Will you even be motivated to come back and look at it unless it’s completely done?  I have often seen senior leaders and executives coming to a Sprint review for the first time when a new Agile team demonstrates their completed work. While these leaders praise the team for their accomplishments, you can see a confused look on their faces asking an unspoken question: The senior leaders and executives eventually stop coming to the Sprint Reviews, as they don’t find them meaningful. 2.  The second most important reason for Sprint Reviews to be not attended by senior leaders or relevant stakeholders has to do with the language used during the demo. What I mean here is, that a lot of Agile teams do the demonstration of their product in technical language. They bring up a screen with a Linux prompt and open the code, showing pieces to confirm on how the goal of a Story is achieved. While this could be attractive to other technical team members or even engineering managers, the business folks really do not get much value from it. This is akin to an audience that understands only Japanese, but being invited to a review of a product that is to be given fully in English. Just imagine bringing up a screen with English letters and words being displayed, with the hosting team speaking only in English. Will the Japanese stakeholders come back to such a Sprint Review? – NO! It would be a good idea for the (Business) Product Owner to actually drive the demo. They can work with the team and also speak the language of business stakeholders. Enabling stakeholders to be able to directly interact with the functionality of a product rather than demoing technical code will also be appealing to them. 3. Sprint Reviews being held on the wrong day of the week. Ideally, the Sprint cadence should run from Wednesday to Tuesday or Thursday to Wednesday. The advantage with this cadence is that the starting and ending days do not fall on a Monday or a Friday – the days when people tend to be busy or not easily available. For example, a 2-week Sprint that starts on a Wednesday will end 2 weeks later on a Tuesday. However, many teams, especially new ones, without much experience, tend to start their Sprints on a Monday or a Tuesday. This results in Sprint Review falling on Fridays or Mondays (Ideally the last day of a Sprint)  when senior leaders and relevant stakeholders are busy and unavailable, resulting in poor attendance.  4.  I have also seen that there are certain scaling frameworks in Agile which tend to encourage many teams in organizing their reviews or demos together. I have seen such teams sitting in a big conference room for hours together doing their Sprint Reviews. This is a painful sight to see. Especially so, because most of these teams were component teams and did not have much understanding of how each other’s work contributed to the bigger product. It is difficult to visualize senior leaders and business stakeholders sitting in such reviews for half a day. It would be considered a big waste of their time, and for this reason, attendance for such Sprint Reviews are low. 5. Lack of proper engagement of key stakeholders also results in poor attendance. Most teams call their Sprint Reviews as Sprint Demos. In fact, Sprint Demo has become the more popular name for Sprint Reviews. The whole idea of this ceremony is about engaging your customers and users for a meaningful conversation and taking important feedback that can be critical for the product success. But more often than not, hardly any conversation takes place. How do we break this barrier? One thing that comes to mind is, that, instead of waiting for the entire Sprint Review to be over, teams should take feedback after every item is reviewed. This will not only keep the stakeholders engaged, but will encourage them to provide valuable feedback for each item at the current time.  How often should we do Sprint Reviews? Ideally speaking, Sprint Reviews should be held every Sprint. However, many teams only create components. They do not work by keeping the big picture in mind. Demoing these small components every

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