How to have an efficient Stand Up Meeting
During the last years of my life every time I join a company I hear developers saying that Stand Up Meetings are boring and they are a waste of time.
For me its always fun to hear these kind of debates, because 90% of the cases the root causes are always the same. People think the purpose of the Stand Up Meeting is to provide status report to the scrum master, they believe Scrum Master is the most interested party in the Stand Up Meeting. Unfortunately they do not understand the Stand Up Meeting is for the team itself :)
Another quite common problem with Stand Up Meetings relies on the fact that stories are not End to End. As a result people will work in silos within the team, some people will work in FrontEnd tasks others will work in Backend tasks. Of course all team members work independently not having dependencies on each other making the Stand Up Meeting quite boring since people can work independently.
As a rule of tumb one of the basic things that teams/companies should do is to create End to End stories, this will create a lot of dependencies between people and the Stand Up Meeting will shift from reporting towards alignment. Of course this is not always so simple but this is a quite common problem that I faced during all my life in different companies.
Another good way to make Stand Up Meetings more interesting is to follow the steps that I describe below. I think when people follow these steps the Stand Up Meetings will be much more interesting and useful.
What stories did I work on yesterday?
Did I closed something?
Yes:
Completion of a known dependency?
Resolving someone’s blocker?
Did I change the interfaces, the design, or infrastructure?
New experience, process, practice?
No:
What problems did I face that blocked me to finish it?
Did I find something unexpected that others should know?
What stories will I be able to complete today?
Did I closed everything from previous day?
Yes:
Before I start a new story can I help someone with his tasks?
Is the sprint Goal in Risk? What can I do to help the team with the Sprint Goal?
No:
Someone’s dependencies on me?
My dependencies on the others?
Expectation of early story completion?
What’s getting in my way (blocking me)?
My dependencies on the others?
Did I change the story/task order?
Not a blocker but risk or difficulty or a slow-down factor?
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