In my post a few months ago on Scrum pain, I criticised the daily stand up. However, they can be very valuable - they can help the team synchronise their efforts and get the right focus for the day ahead.

Here are some tips that I’ve found useful ..

• Meet close to work desks. Some of the content of the meeting is about progress and plans on work items and there will be many memory triggers for this at our work desks, perhaps even a kanban board
• Start the meeting first thing in the morning, at same time every day. This will help everyone focus for the day.
• Always start on time. Start, even if members haven’t made it on time, including scrum master. This ensures that this event is a minimum interuption to everyones day
• Stand up. This helps the meeting stay focused - physical discomfort will indicate that the meeting is going on for too long
• Rotate the person driving the meeting. This encourages team autonomy
• Avoid problem solving. It is natural for developers to problem solve but this isn’t the focus of this meeting - take the problem solving offline
• Get commitment for today’s plan. Watch out for “I think …”, “I hope …”, ”… as soon as possible” - the team member isn’t really making a good commitment using these words. We want to hear “I will ” with a specific timings
• Do not to commit to things beyond our control. For example “I will fix 5 bugs today” has a good chance of failure if we don’t know anything about the 5 bugs. The problem with failure is that the next time that person gives a commitment, it will likely have an inflated timescale. It’s much better if we say something like “I’ve looked into bug X, I know the root cause and will have the fix checked in by lunch time. I will then start looking at bug Y and if I get that done, bug Z”.
• Get commitment from the Scrum master. Make sure the Scrum master is specific about the timing of the next step in removing any impediments that come up. If the Scrum master is developing, then get their commitments for the day, just like the other developers on the team
• If you are the Scrum master, break eye contact. This encourages team members to address the team which in tern encourages automony
• Time the meetings. Share the results. This will reduce the risk of meetings dragging on
• Finish positively. “Enjoy your morning everyone!”