Daily Stand up Meetings – Healthy Agile Ritual

Introduction:

A stand-up meeting (or simply “stand-up”) is a daily team meeting held to provide status update to the team members. The stand up meeting is sometimes also referred to as the “stand-up”, “morning roll call” or “daily scrum”. Though this is an agile practice relevant in Scrum, it can be utilized in any development methodology.

Key elements of Stand-up:

1. All the participants huddle in circle and stand up to keep it short
   1. It is usually time boxed to 10-15 minutes.
   2. Discomfort of standup is one way to keep it short.
2. Each participant must answer 3 questions to the team:
   1. What did I accomplish yesterday?
   2. What will I do today?
   3. What obstacles are impeding my progress?
3. All team participates with one member acting as “Facilitator” (Known as Scrum master in Scrum practice)

Purpose of Stand-up

1.  To bring in osmotic communication within the team
2. To allow participants to know about potential challenges as well as coordinate efforts to resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues.
3. To remind people to keep the meeting short and to the point.
4. To keep energy levels high with quick huddle.

Stand-up GIFTS:

1. Good Start – means to start the day well. Stand-up meeting gives energy, not take it. Energy comes from instilling a sense of purpose and urgency; a clear sense of the purpose and a clear understanding what needs to be done to achieve it.
2. Improvement – means Stand-up support sharing better techniques and ideas. It also exposes the problems if any in the project, product or team (people) and hence giving scope for improvement.
3. Focus – Stand-up reinforces focus on the right things. Enables team to focus on results (objectives) and prevents getting lost in activity as often people mix up activity with progress. In simple terms, focus on baton and not on runners.
4. Team – Stand-up inculcates the sense of belongingness to the members of team as they share the results and obstacles by regular communication and helping each other. This in turn encourages autonomy through “Self-Management” within teams.
5. Status – Team share the progress of the work as status to every team member bringing in transparency and identifying loop holes if any in the project. It also acts as “Sensor” indicating the true health of the team and project/product.

Signs of “Effective Stand up”

1. Participants meet at same time and same venue daily.
2. Though it may not be practical to limit all discussion to these three questions, the goal is to stick as closely as possible to these questions.
3. A focused team or good facilitator uses “Take it Offline” phrase effectively to prevent “Problem Solving discussions”, “Socializing” and “Story-Telling” during the standup.
4. Encourages shared responsibility through rotation of facilitator (scrum master) within the team.

Signs of “Poor Stand-up”

1. Participants turn up late or do not attend regularly.
2. At times, participants wait for the stand-up to begin the work day.
3. Facilitator/Scrum-master is treated as manager or reporting authority.
4. Participants convert the status update into the report update.
5. Participants socialize, solve problems, and tell stories (long conversations)
6. Participants have eye-contact with single individual/facilitator by updating the status to facilitator/individual and not to team.
7. Participants come unprepared for answering the 3 questions and in turn think on the fly or say ‘I can’t remember” defeating the purpose of the Stand-up.
   
   
   
   
   Source : Internet