To be productive, we need to stay focused on working. We also need to communicate and stay up to date with our team.
Your daily stand-up or scrum is an obstruction to that flow of getting work done. To prevent disrupting flow any more than needed, we try and minimize the time needed during this ceremony.
What if your scrum or stand-up is running long. Way longer than the usual 10 - 15 minutes. What's up?
There are two things that usually cause this from my experience:
- Not staying on topic in the meeting (i.e. "getting into the weeds")
- Your scrum has too many people
Not Staying on Topic
This is a matter of discipline. Your update should be simple.
Let's say Kim is currently building a login page for a website.
Her contribution could be:
Moving forward with building the login page. I'm not sure if we want to support other login types than just e-mail for now. Sarah, can we meet up afterwards to discuss?
Sarah would reply:
Yep, let's talk after this, we'll get the details hammered out.
Then we would move on to the next person in the scrum call. Short and to the point.
What if you have some suggestions when someone states an open ended problem?
Simple, use these words:
I have some ideas around that, let's discuss it after the meeting.
And then you move on.
Scrum is not for problem solving! It is for reporting in and starting other asynchronous discussions so everyone can get back to working.
Any time you're sitting there hashing out how to solve a problem when 3 or more other people are just sitting there, you're likely wasting a lot of time.
Finally, it's up to your scrum lead to call people out on this. Just gently remind folks with the following:
This sounds like it's getting a bit detailed. Would it be possible to discuss this after the meeting?
Your Scrum Has Too Many People
This is one that subtly creeps in as we try and include all the different roles on a team and keep everyone up to date.
It usually starts with adding your quality assurance point man to the call. Then you add in your managers. Finally, you add in more stakeholders. Then some other developers seem related to this project, so we add them too.
I'm here to tell you, this is a bad idea. Keep it simple. Try and keep it down to the following people:
- Scrum leader
- Developers working on the specific product
- Quality assurance point person
- A product owner / stakeholder
Ideally, this list will add up to about 5 people. Any larger and you're getting into unwieldy territory. It's the same reason why you don't play board games with more than about 6 people, it takes too long.
More importantly, if you have a massive scrum, it's a communication "smell" that maybe your team members aren't communicating effectively outside of scrum time.
You'll notice this is happening when you start hearing the following phrases:
Wait 'til scrum, we'll bring it up then when everyone is there.
Let the product owner know that's missing from the requirements at the next scrum. They'll know how to deal with it.
Do you see the problem here? We're waiting until an established ceremony to bring up issues. Scrum becomes your dumping point for any and all ideas, problems, and troubleshooting.
Because of this, you start adding any and all people who need to be there to hear these details so they're in the know and can respond.
You end up bottle-necking the majority of the communication to within the scrum. It's inefficient and it promotes siloing within your organisation.
How do you combat this? It's more of the scrum lead promoting the good behaviour.
- Keep telling folks to keep things focused and break out into communication outside of scrum.
- Explain to your teams that scrum is just a starting point for communication. They need to be reaching out to communicate outside of scrum more than they do within scrum.
That second point is critical. The most effective teams are those that keep each other in the loop by themselves. It means strong communicative skills that are not tied around a single meeting.
Conclusion
Keep your meetings concise and break any extraneous discussion out into new discussions if you want to keep your scrum on track.
Scrum is just a ceremony. It shouldn't be a replacement for any large portion of communication on a team.