You come to the meeting. Your team leader or scrum master, goes around and asks you to give a status update.
1. "What did you do yesterday?"
2. "What am I doing today?"
3. "What do I need help with?"
Most of the time, teams tend to talk about 1 and 2. Quite rarely an impediment is raised and often times, this 15 minute ceremony drags for 30 minutes, sometimes an hour long.
The Daily Standup is the most recognisable feature of Agile/Scrum. However, I can immediately tell if there is an Agile mindset maturity based on how the daily standup is conducted.
List of Agile Anti-Patterns in Daily Standup
The following is a list of Agile Anti-Patterns that affects the quality of the Standup, the Sprint, and The Team.
1. The standup is NOT the first ceremony in the day
Many teams do not make it the first ceremony of the day. The standup is relegated to a status update, and deemed something you do in agile to satisfy the pre-requisite for the team to be considered agile. In other words, it is a chore. But you do it, because, you're supposed to be agile.
2. The standup takes longer than 15 minutes
Many stand-ups take longer than 15 minutes. This is too long because meetings may either energise you or deplete your energy. The longer your meeting, the higher the likelihood you will feel fatigued. This is not what you want early in your day.
3. The standup is not conducted consistently at the same time
Strong habits are formed when they are consistent. Unfortunately, organisations don't make stand-ups a habit because other meetings are deemed more important than a stand-up. This forces the team to either report asynchronously, or cancel the stand-up altogether.
4. The standup is attended by more than 10 people
Some organisations call for a daily stand-up that are attended by many layers of the organisation ending up with 50 status updates no one can remember. This tends to happen when the organiser of the stand-up is higher management and he/she wants to get an update from every member. Of course, this will naturally extend the time taken to conduct the stand-up.
5. The standup does not make use of the scrum board as reference
Especially for stand-ups done remotely, the scrum board / sprint board / kanban board is never used as reference. This results in the team naturally using the stand-up as a status update when the action items and their statuses are actually on the board.
6. The standup compels the team to answer the question of what was done yesterday
The team has to report the activities the day before, because the assumption is, the stand-up is a status update meeting. Teams like this do not have a sprint plan. However, when they do have a sprint plan, they also don't make it a habit of referencing the scrum board, and the sprint velocity. The sprint velocity predicts the points that the team is supposed to deliver daily. Teams do not deliver the sprint goal because they do not actually understand that it should not be reporting what was done the day before, but rather what was not yet completed as planned that would affect the success of the sprint and should ideally be top of mind and action for the current day.
7. The standup does not remind the team about the sprint goal
The team does not get reminded why they are here. The reason for the sprint is defined by the sprint goal. Nearly every stand-up I've observed do not make the team get reminded that they need to earn the W and score all the points they committed to the sprint goal.
8. The standup does not energise the team
At the end of the stand-up, the team does not feel energised and not motivated to go after the sprint goal. Typically what happens is the team would go for a coffee break because they're not yet in the zone to put them in flow.
9. The team does not prepare for the standup
Most teams do not prepare for the standup because it's just 15 minutes. What's there to prepare? So they waltz in, following the agenda, reporting the 3 things they're supposed to report.
Why Agile Anti-Patterns Exist in Daily Standup
Agile Anti-Patterns exist in Daily Standup because it is incorrectly perceived as a status update. Once teams have this perception, almost every Agile Anti-Pattern tends to surface. Yet, practising agile requires the team to conduct these daily meetings but if they misunderstand the purpose then true agility actually escapes them.
Waterfall teams do not have a daily huddle. These teams tend to have a weekly progress meeting. These meetings take a couple of hours to conduct, and the keyword "progress" means teams must give a status update of their progress for the week.
Teams that adopt agile from a waterfall environment then mis-construe that instead of having a weekly progress meeting, they now have a daily progress meeting, because... Agile.
So... what the heck is a Daily Standup if it's not a Status Update?
In a recent Agile Workshop I conducted with a colleague of mine, Rashad Kamsheh, an Agile Coach, he described a Daily Standup as something similar to a basketball team huddle. The reference to team sports is correct. I built on this analogy in order to help teams understand the purpose of the Daily Standup better.
Before I can describe what is the point of the Daily Standup, let's first understand what is a sprint. A sprint is a time block, normally 2 weeks, that a team commits to in order to deliver a Product Increment (PI). The team typically refers to the product backlog to create the sprint backlog. Each sprint will contain some stories that the team commits to. Ideally, each story is already sized and estimated. Then the team defines the sprint goal, which is a purpose statement behind what the team is expected to deliver.
Let's imagine that the Product Roadmap is a fixtures listing of all the matches (sprints) the team needs to play in order to win the championship (release the product).
A sprint is simply a game you play with 10 periods (if your sprint is 2 weeks/10 days). At every period, you are checking the score board (your scrum board / sprint board / kanban board) to see if you're winning or losing the game. The point of that game is to win (your sprint goal). You need to earn enough wins in order to win the championship (releasing your product).
A Daily Standup is therefore a Team Huddle with the sole purpose of reminding the team why you're here, which is to win, which is your sprint goal, and have instructions communicated on what is needed (what you need to do for that period) to win your match, which is your sprint. While the team communicates what is needed to win, players are unblocking impediments by getting pain relief from their medic, getting instructions from other team mates, getting energiser boosters from their nutritionists and so on. The huddle is only most relevant to the set of players that are playing or expected to play. Not your entire roster. The huddle is always 15 minutes long. Never more. At the end of the huddle, the team comes together and chant to rile themselves up, to energise each other, and motivate each other to win the game.
That, is the point of the Daily Standup. Not a Status Update. No coach is going to go in at half time and ask the player, "what did you do yesterday?". It is not relevant to the match. What's relevant is what did not go to plan and how should we address it.
If you conduct your Daily Standup to energise your team, that is when you are actually living agility. If you're still treating it as a low-value status update, you're still stuck in waterfall mindsets. Start re-framing daily stand-ups as a team activity that helps teams start the day with high energy in order for them to score the points they need to win.
Photo by Quyn Phạm: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-coach-making-a-plan-for-the-team-13907431/