Hello friends, I am Namrata Shah. I have gathered box of information while working in IT Industry from last 10 years. I am starting this new journey to write blogs to share my own experiences and exchange ideas with like minded people who are working in startups and try to self learn lot many things. I have worked over various kind of projects be it T and M , fixed cost, small duration projects, long duration products in IT industry .
I have been working in startup since I started my career and have encountered with lot of professionals working in Google, Microsoft, CSC, etc either as client or as seniors . I tried to gain knowledge from them and started applying different tips and tricks which are manageable in startups where environment is pretty much dynamic.
Now coming to the topic
I am pouring all my thoughts/experience here in regards to running effective daily scrum meetings which can be adopted by leads and project managers easily for running scrums even in small firms/startups too.
I will be covering
- What does Standup mean?
- Types of Agile Stand-ups
- How to run effective scrum stand-ups?
What does Standup mean?
It could be called as small status check meeting , time boxed, held every day at a particular time.
You would hear from people calling them with different names: DSM, Scrum meeting, Standup.
The more exciting thing about this is as its name suggests — participants of this meet remain standing while in meet to keep it short. Now a days when we are working remotely — Communication has become very crucial and standup plays an important part in that by keeping everyone in sync with each other and stakeholders and understand the how the project is moving.
Types of Stand-ups
Scrum Stand-ups
When you are following SCRUM framework to run the project — These standups are called as “Daily Scrum meetings”, “Daily Scrums”.In these, we mainly focus on sprint goals and answer three questions when people provide their updates:
What did you do yesterday?
What are you going to do today?
Are there is blockers/impediments they have?
Any impediments/blockers becomes Scrum Master’s responsibility to get it resolved as soon as possible.
Kanban Stand-ups
In these standup — team basically works towards correcting any bottlenecks/issues before or as they appear by providing solutions to it instead of focusing on what everyone is working on. The Kanban board anyway allows us to quickly see where tasks are and who is working on what.
The vast majority of teams actually use daily scrum meetings.
How to run effective Daily scrums meets
- Send a recurring calendar invite with agenda in description. This gives any newbie also an idea what they are going to discuss in meet when they appear.
- Don’t wait for everyone to join the standup — Giving 1/2 mins is sufficient.
- Ask team to be prepared with updates ahead of time if its first time when they are appearing in standups
- Rotate on meeting facilitator.
- Keep it short and stick to the topic
- Ask team to pass on the call to next person when they are done with their updates.
- Bring up your board during meeting so that everybody know where scrum master is looking at.
- If any individual starts discussing any issues or blockers — request them to keep it for parking lot and pass on the chance to other.
- Before ending the meet — ask if anybody has any questions and if there are people who have questions/issues/blockers — ask them to mention who do they want to be in mee/discussion and rest of the people could leave the room or drop if on virtual calls.
What to do when you are working with dispersed teams?
- Set a timezone which suits everyone and do scrum stand-ups at that time following the above points to remember to run effective stand-ups.
- If you are unable to conclude on a time which is convenient to everyone — let individual do meetings belonging to same geographies and provide your updates on tools like Rally, Sharepoint, slack, Wiki so that everyone gets into sync.