7 Tips for a Standout Daily Standup!
Do your daily 15 minutes of fame come through lame? Keep your head up! We’re dispatching a fresh load of tips, gadgets, stories and experiments to try on your next “daily”.
Agile Matinée is a fortnightly dispatch curated by Panaxeo, one Agile topic at a time. We bribe five Agile enthusiasts with croissants and expect them to collect interesting and read-worthy content in return. Here’s one on Dailys.
1. Research’d — Do Developers Actually Hate Standups?
Viktoria Stray from the University of Oslo bunched up with two fellow researchers to shed some light on the central question of our times — do developers hate standups? I won’t spill the beans, but the researchers concluded that seniority, team size, and frequency all play a role in enabling 15 minutes of joy or despair. Even if reading research papers is not your thing, try this one. It’s very readable and the conclusions are well summarized.
2. From The Trenches — The 4,000-employee Daily Standup in SAAB
Many of us know SAAB as the “car company that doesn’t make cars anymore”. But did you know they are the creme de la creme manufacturers of fighter jets? Their success leans heavily on being Agile through and through. There’s a ton of jaw-dropping stories from SAAB, but we find the way they approached their daily stands with 4k+ attendees as one of the most interesting ways how to scale a meeting.
3. Spruce it up! — 7 Fun Standup Ideas to Keep Teams Focused & Engaged
While there are plenty of facilitation tips all over the Internet, we regard this selection from Geekbot as particularly neat. Their tips strike the right balance between the specific and the general, leaving room to tailor each tip to your circumstance.
Our tip: Pick five and try one a day next week.
4. Go Bizarre! — The Potato Facilitator Gadget
Ever wondered how to tame that chatty Cathy on your standup? Dimitris from Delphi solved the problem with a custom-made, 3D-printed, spud-shaped, time-ticking bomb gadget to enforce limits on the talkers in his team. Much time and sophistication went into his pet project. So be a good citizen and give Dimitris a read.
5. The Kanban Column — 7 Principles for Streamlining Your Dailys
Kanbanists, beware. Sonya Siderova from Nave shared some nice and sober tips for facilitating a standup for teams running a Kanban. We especially liked the subtle but powerful idea of “walking the board from right to left” until you hit the wall (we might have made that up).
6. The Experiment — Asynchronous Daily Standups
Just like with other things in life, a small experiment here and there won’t hurt. The pals from Friday.app shared their thoughts on the pros and cons of switching your dailies to the asynchronous lane. While this might not be the ideal long-term solution, why not give it a try this Friday and see what happens?
7. Hidden Gem — Scrum.org’s Facilitation Resources for the Daily Scrum
Look, we all love Scrum.org. But for whatever reason, they keep shoving their best content four levels deep into their webpage. So, if you ever wondered how to avoid your standups turning into status reports, how to ask powerful questions virtually, or about facilitating a daily in general, go brew yourself a nice big cup of whatever and dig into this treasure chest of articles.
Bonus — Panaxeo says, “Let it Flow”
I love my team’s standups — we don’t have a structure. Yet, they are effective and mostly fun.
What’s the secret, you might ask?
There’s no secret. I simply focus on the actual purpose of the team meeting daily — identifying and managing the risks of not meeting the sprint goal as a team.
So, as a Scrum Master, my primary concern is for the daily to happen, well… every day we work.
When I attend, I silently focus my attention on the question, “Are we talking about risks?” And whatever conversation gets us there is fine by me.
Over time, I noticed that letting the conversation flow naturally is actually really effective.
The reason is that teams perform best when they build on each other’s ideas and insights. That’s where freely flowing conversation always trumps “passing the baton” agendas. We all think in different patterns — and putting them into “the blender” may be a good recipe to gain more insights as a team (compared to imposing a robotic 3 question structure on every living being).
I can hear you — “But I am worried about the discussion getting off the rails.” Just let it happen. Then bring it back to the team and agree on the boundaries together. (Alternatively, equip them with a robotic potato bomb.)
So yes, for me, Daily Standups are a risk management event. And fun, too. You never would’ve guessed that these two things could coexist, would you? :)
Adam Okruhlica, our co-CEO at Panaxeo
That’s it; we’re off.
Hope you’ve basked enough in this Agile well of inspiration. Now go about your day and put this stuff into practice! Oh, and unless you want to miss our next digest, follow us on LinkedIn or share this post with your friends and frenemies!
Hasta la Agilista, baby!