Top 10 Resource Management Tools in 2024
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Conducting a Daily Scrum meeting is a tradition many teams follow. Some of them see tangible results of these meetings, while others struggle to keep the momentum going. Perhaps you are in one of those groups or maybe you don’t even organize daily standups for your Scrum team. Today, we’ll try to show you ways in which you can get started with or improve your team’s Daily Scrum.
Let’s start by referring to the Scrum Guide, which is a great source of information about all things Scrum, Scrum meetings included. It defines daily Scrum as a “15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours.”
Looking at this definition, the Daily Scrum meeting seems fairly straightforward. Subtle details, however, may derail your team meetings and turn them into unproductive status updates. In order to get to the bottom of this, we’ll start by recapping the goals of these daily meetings.
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The Daily Scrum is an opportunity for your team to:
The Scrum master’s role is to make sure that every team member understands the purpose of these meetings, but the development team is responsible for conducting the daily standup. This approach helps to foster team accountability and the spirit of self-organization. Ultimately, when the team is able to conduct efficient and effective Daily Scrum sessions, the Scrum master doesn’t even need to be there for their duration.
Many Scrum practitioners emphasize that it’s essential not to let your team Daily Scrum meetings morphe into status meetings. The problem is that many people don’t really see a significant difference between these two. We’ll try to clear things up.
When you think of status updates (meetings or, for example, written project status reports), you probably imagine you and your team reporting to someone, whether it’s a manager or a client. And that’s the thing: during a daily standup, your team doesn’t report to anyone. Instead, they work together to come up with a plan for the next 24 hours.
Yet another difference between Daily Scrum and status meetings is what gets discussed during them. Status updates are often recaps of who did what and what was the result of this action. This is where things can get a little blurry. After all, the attendees of a Daily Scrum meeting also discuss the work done. The difference is that the primary outcome of daily meetings should not be a list of things that have been done but a collaborative vision of how the Scrum team can work for the next 24 hours to meet their Sprint goals.
These differences may seem minor, but there’s a real benefit in not turning your team’s daily standups into status meetings. Stick to the Scrum Guide: your meetings will be more effective. On top of that, your team members will see the value and actively participate.
Even though each Scrum meeting is governed by some rules, there’s still plenty of flexibility you and your team can benefit from. We’ve outlined some tips for optimizing your team’s Daily Scrum meetings below. We didn’t focus on particular techniques (plank daily standup, anyone?), but instead listed small things you can consider to make your team’s work more efficient.
This subject deserves its own section because increasing employee visibility is what we help companies with every day. Our resource management software makes it possible to track who is working on a given day and who is on vacation. Part-time employees and freelancers can input their exact availability, so you know that they are available, say, between 9 am to 11 am.
What does it have to do with Daily Scrum meetings? Imagine a situation when one of the members of your Scrum team takes a day off. The rest of the group gathers for a daily meeting only to realize that they don’t have the full picture of the progress without that person’s input. When your employees’ availability is visible to project managers and Scrum masters, they can act in advance. One idea would be to ask the person who’s going on vacation to take a moment the day before and share their progress and impediments with someone on the team who can relay this information during the standup.
On top of that, knowing when everyone is available makes it easier to schedule the time slot for your team’s daily meeting. If you’re interested in implementing a resource management solution to optimize your company’s processes, schedule a call with Aniela. She’ll be happy to advise you on how you can save time and money with an efficient absence tracking system.