How to Organize Your Daily Stand Up Meeting

Daily stand up meeting, I’m sure this will not be an alien term if you are working in IT industry, and if you are practicing scrum.

Stand up meetings are usually scheduled in the morning,which helps team members to get synchronized to each other’s work, it also psychologically help teams to have a fresh beginning and to set daily goals. Stand up meetings definitely plays a very important role in keeping the momentum of the team and in keeping team members together. It doesn’t matter if your team is located at remote locations nor if the team is working in the same place, it plays an equally important role in achieving the targets. It is a must for whole team to participate in this daily meeting.

Stand up meeting is lead by the scrum master. Its scrum Master’s responsibility to schedule the stand up meetings, to make sure all people are available and attend during the stand up, most importantly should ensure that the meeting starts on time and ends on time. It is recommended to have a one place and one time slot continuously throughout the project execution. It can be a call or a gathering is team is co-located. As the scrum team it is mandatory to have the full team attended to the stand up including, scrum master, product owner, developers and

Stand up meetings should be backed by a physical scrum board or a tool which facilitates with a scrum board. Team should ideally gather around it, and keep it up to date.

So next and the most important part is, what should you speak in order to have an effective discussion during the stand up meeting, you mainly have to speak on three areas, an explanation on what did you do yesterday, what are you planning to do today and obstacles or points to to be taken action to be sorted out.

What Did I Do Yesterday?

The question is obvious; it’s intended for the person to update everyone on their progress on the task they are working on. It’s a way for the Team Lead and the rest of the team to follow progress without having to chase. If the person didn’t get anything done then it obviously indicates there is a problem, or if it’s not going as fast as thought maybe an issue with the estimate and initial workload scoped. Scrum master can get a clue about the task finishing on estimated time through the statements he make in here.

What Am I Going To Do Today?

For this, now each team member will discuss, in front of the rest of the team on their plans for that day. This is a good way to ensure each person is responsible for what they are doing, and that they are accountable if things are not going well. If the person has nothing to do, it’s good that you had the meeting at the beginning of the day and caught this problem early. If you are using a Scrum Board there is probably a task they can take (with the next priority) or help someone else out.

What’s In My Way?

This is the final point as well as the most important point, which is used to identify any impediments or bottlenecks. What is preventing productivity? Are there any new issues the team need to know about? These could be from hardware issues, an unclear area from developers, technical difficulty or maybe someone needs to take emergency leave. Also this part should mention about the dependencies on each other, or any other external dependencies. The Scrum Master is responsible for taking note on these and then removing them for the team.

Stand up meeting is really a good method to be keep teams motivated and goal oriented. Though we expect everything to run smooth there can be lot of things coming your way when having successful stand up meeting.

Next article will be on things to consider for having a short and effective stand up meeting…….