Scrum Mastery

by Geoff Watts

efficiency can lead to monotony if you aren’t careful. Answering the same questions with the same people at the same time every day can become a little tedious. So the best ScrumMasters have all found interesting ways to “sex up” their teams’ daily scrums. The ideas that Harvey came up with in the story — moving from card to card instead of person to person, and using a toy bomb to add a bit of fun and remind people to be concise—are just two of many techniques that will liven up the daily scrum: • Have individual countdown timers. • Use a “bored” buzzer that anyone in the team can hit if they feel it’s getting boring. • Start the meeting with a joke, a “guess the song from the lyric”, or a “guess the movie from the quote” competition. • Begin the meeting with a trivia question and keep score throughout the sprint, or start with a fun fact about a member of the team. • Introduce food or drink, e.g. pastries, fruit, or coffee. • Give your update in the style of someone else (perhaps another member of the team, or a famous person). Maybe award a point for the person who can guess who you are impersonating? • Draw your updates in a Pictionary style. • Change the time of the daily scrum. Some teams find that having their daily scrum at the end of the day is a nice way to close out the day (especially if people all start at different times). Plus, they don’t then have to remember what they did yesterday and they all know what they are picking up when they come in the next morni...