So you’re managing a team and you need some help with synchronicity. Need to know what’s going on with everyone in your team? Daily Stand-ups sound like just the thing you need! Learn about daily stand-ups or daily scrum. These meetings are not just a status update, it’s an essential tool.

Read for our tips and suggestions with team development.

There are three main parts that we will cover:

1. Defining Daily Stand-up
2. Why you need it as a leader
3. Implementation
4. Why you need Focus

Defining the Daily Stand-up

Daily stand-ups, daily scrum, daily meetings or whatever name you know them as are all the same thing. They are daily check-in meetings you have with your team.

Daily Stand-ups are timely, informal, and get to the point. No need to prepare presentations or rehearse, just go down a list of critical information you need to share. Your team should provide information on their obstacles and possibly what they’re doing to mitigate these problems.

The advantage to daily scrum is that you can give your input right away. Give some criticism or share some helpful tips.

You can even shut down ideas and help narrow down what your team should be doing.

These meetings originated as a tool for development teams-Agile development teams that it. Agile teams are defined by the Harvard Business Review here: Agile at Scale. They’ve grown since then and should be utilized by all teams, non-technical or otherwise.

Why you need it (as a leader)

These daily scrum are vital for team coordination. They are an effective form of communication that help you stay on task.

When your team is in sync, you can achieve more. Get better results, faster results more efficiently.

For example, you want to have your team post on the company’s social media everyday. Creating a calendar and delegating the tasks is the first step. If someone misses a post or creates something not to your liking, a face to face meeting, even over video call is the best way to communicate your message. A quick call can aid in overcoming misunderstandings.

Daily stand-ups prevent critical issues from growing.

These frequent stand-ups don’t allow for issues to fall through the crack. Because problems can be address easily as they appear or even before they’re noticeable, they can be tackled on the spot.

Daily Stand-ups are not just individual reports.

The benefit of doing daily stand-ups is its notable difference from a normal meeting or report. If you treat these daily stand-ups like a a report meeting then you lose it’s value.

Here are some examples of how you can stay in sync:

1. Write a mini agenda/list so that the team can view
2. Don’t go off topic in daily stand-ups
3. Stay active in group chats
4. Use Focus (more details below)

At Focus, our main goal is to help teams achieve the most! We want to share our technology and OKR guides so that no matter how big or small your organization is, it can reach it’s full potential. We believe in daily stand-ups and that every leader should give it a try!

Implementation

So now that you’re ready to start having these daily scrum with your team, here’s what you need to know.

Rule #1 is to know your team’s schedule. Find a time that works for everyone and that means everyone. Having expected attendance and participation gathers respect. You show respect for your team and take time to check up on them, so they should share their honest thoughts and comments in return.

Rule #2 is to keep it short. This is not the time to have long, deep in-depth conversations. These daily stand-ups can delve into personal topics, but should ultimately stay light and focused. You want to understand what’s going on and any obstacles. Any “blockers” that need more than 15 minutes to explain should be saved for a later meeting, which you can plan during this daily check-in.

The length of daily stand-ups are a great advantage. Each party has to equally participate and the limited time helps everyone stay focused to not only talk about their plans but also actively listen.

On a side note, these meetings are short, so remember to be on time!

There’s no space for uncomfortably in daily stand-ups.

Rule #3 is to always address impediments. If your team never has any issues then it’s because they don’t feel comfortable diverging information. As there are always ways to improve, there will always be obstacles to your goal. Leaders should aid in teamwork, meaning your team should not be too intimidated to let you know what issues they face. Be wary of this secrecy. Even if your team is at their peak performance, have them share their impediments and how they can address them.

There’s no time for passivity.

The last major rule is to stay committed! Don’t give up on these meetings. Daily means daily. As casual as they may be, your team should treat is an a important part of their day. The more you value these stand-ups the more your team will as well. Lead by example and you’ll soon enjoy the benefits of daily stand-ups!

My personal tip is to thank people for their time! As quick as these meetings are, it’s always polite to give a “thank you” to the person for their time. It’s better not to assume what your team’s schedule might be. Last minute changes can happen to these meetings, and you might not know what plans they had to move to make it on time. Take advantage of this time to recognize your employee’s hard work and build your professional relationship! It never hurts to be polite and friendly. This relationship can translate into work and in turn improve your team’s commitment.

Daily Stand-ups go a long way.

Read our tips on one on one meetings:

9 One on One Meeting Tips

What are One on One Meetings

Why you need Focus

At Focus, we pride ourselves on being communication-oriented and solution driven. Our use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) helps our team to stay on task and figure out creative solutions.

Read more about these OKRs on our blog:

What are OKRs

We use many forms of communication to let our team know our status. Focus had daily check ins where you share your actions and tasks as well as meaningful insight. Every member of the team can see what everyone else is doing. To make this process even more convenient, we have a Slackbot for these daily check ins as well. Weekly team meetings and one on one meetings are a must for our team. Our blog serves as evidence of this synchronicity!

We post about the changes Focus has gone through on our blog:

Focus Update

Daily stand-ups, check-ins, and OKR are growing in popularity so you and your team should give us a try! Don’t lag behind all the teams and start-ups. With Focus, you’ll find ease in fostering clarity and teamwork across all types of departments and projects!

Schedule a meeting with our CEO and team at Focus.

Let me know what you think about my article and share your experience with daily stand-ups below! Follow our Facebook and LinkedIn!

The post Daily Stand-ups are a Must! Here’s Why. appeared first on Focus.

There is a focus on high-quality of product development in Scrum methodology. That’s why scrum meetings have high priority and run by a scrum master. The main goal of the scrum meeting is team synchronization. 

Who is a scrum master?

The better definition of a scrum master role is “servant leader”. 

Scrum master’s goal is to help a team increase efficiency by:

• Solving the problems that are discussed in the scrum meetings
• Learning. A scrum master has the crucial role of onboarding new members into the team
• Motivation. The experienced scrum master creates a feeling of belonging. They highlight something valuable for each team member to take away after scrum meetings.
• Asking the right questions. How to do better what we are doing well right now? What kind of processes doesn’t add value to our product? 

A scrum master is responsible for the development velocity and time scales of launching products. 

Also, a scrum master together with the product owner and team members plans the sprint that the team will do. Jeff Sutherland, the author of the book “The Scrum Book”, says that a scrum master is the head of the team.

Ideal scrum master

Some teams do experiments and create a monthly scrum master rotation where everyone can become a scrum master for a month. However, if you take a look at the list of scrum master skills and responsibilities, you quickly figure out that it’s not a good way to organize the work.

Ideal scrum master skills:

• Encourage discussion – scrum, retrospectives, and sprints will not be effective without open discussion inside the team. The goal of a scrum master is to encourage this kind of communication using all types of methods and tools for it (company’s Wiki, messengers, project management software, etc). 

• Removing barriers to successful project completion – create and improve communication methods (for instance, create team knowledge base), complete daily routine jobs for team traction (update process diagrams, etc), solve team members problems after scrum meetings.
• To be a scrum evangelist – scrum master understands scrum better than anyone in the team, he/she teaches people and helps to get the best results from the methodology.
• Deliver project vision – this skill complements the motivation role, this is especially crucial in long-term projects with a lot of sprints.
• Solve conflicts – the truth is born in an argument, but conflicts create hurt and aggression. A scrum master prevents toxic communication and conflicts to build constructive criticism.  

What is a scrum meeting?

Scrum meeting or daily standups are a crucial tool of Scrum methodology. It’s a daily meeting, which is moderated by a scrum master and usually runs in the mornings. 

During daily standups, team members talk or write down answers to three simple questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What was your blocks or obstacles?

Scrum meetings help to synchronize the teamwork and much more:

• Align the team and project vision – everyone understands how the project is moving and sees that the amount of obstacles has diminished;
• Set actual goals and response for the status of the project;
• Build the team – people learn to hear other employees and understand their goals and motives;
• Find out the best solution for the job.

Differences between scrum standup and meetup?

Standups (or scrum meetings) and meetups have different meanings despite similar names. A meetup is an event with unfamiliar people who are interested in the meetup theme. People in daily standups know each other pretty well because they are working in one company.  

Other differences between scrum standups and meetup:

5 usual scrum mistakes 

1. Scrum meetings are only for the scrum master: as the scrum master leads the meeting, a participant might look only to the scrum master and answer him while other members take care of their deals. It’s not a productive environment and the scrum master’s goals are to build connection “speaker – other members.”
2. Daily standups are for planning – the new task might be born on the daily standup and there is a huge desire to start discussing it right away in the scrum meeting. Don’t do it. Run 15-min daily standup and then create a new meeting for discussing the new tasks.
3. Daily standups are for technical questions – one of the participants might know about the technical side more than others. Focusing the discussion on technical details doesn’t help you to achieve scrum goals. It takes the meeting in the wrong direction.
4. Scrum meeting is not run on the workspace – the ideal place for running daily standup is near scrum board (board of tasks or Gantt chart) because it allows the team to better understand current statuses and traction. 
5. Scrum meeting with 2 questions – using only 2 questions “What did I do yesterday?” and “What am I going to do today?” People don’t like to talk about problems and blockers, especially in the group meeting, not 1-on-1 meetings. However, it’s crucial to discuss problems in the scrum meetings to close the sprint successfully.

How to run scrum meetings?

A team runs scrum meetings every day. That’s why it is also called daily scrum or daily standups. Meetings are usually run in the same place and have a time limit, which is 15 minutes. This limit helps to stop participants from discussing insignificant themes and allows standups to be more productive.

During a daily standup, each member answers 3 questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What’re blockers do you have?

Focus on the status of the jobs allows the team to align and understands how much the team must do to finish the sprint. If the developer says “I am going to finish the module for the database today”, the other participants will figure out results the next day.

Problems are a scrum master’s responsibility. He/she chooses when to solve it – either in the scrum meeting if it’s a small issue or if it’s something more significant a note will be added to their schedule. 

Usual obstacles that team members have:

• A broken laptop
• The team member hasn’t got the software that he or she needs for work
• One of the departments asks a member to work on another problem for a couple of days
• A member needs help with software installation

How to run a scrum meeting correctly

1. Limit the total amount of participants up to 6 people on the daily standup. If the team has more people in the project then it’s better to divide members into several groups where each of the groups has its own scrum master. Usually, groups are created by jobs such as the Quality Assurance group, Engineers group, etc. 
2. Solve urgent problems – some problems are critical and you should solve them asap. It’s better to run the meeting without a 15-minute limit to allow for the top-priority problem. A scrum master decides how long your meeting should be. 
3. Write down daily scrum rules – they should be clear for everyone and be easily accessible (for example, rules are on the board).
4. Stop personal discussions – talking about last night’s football game, problems with parking or new premiers are taking time away from your 15-min meeting. The scrum master’s goal is to focus the team on the right conversation and avoid digressing with additional topics.
5. Create a productive format – for example, if you run lengthy meetings, start doing standups. If participants aren’t initiated, use gamification – for example, suggest to a team member, who answered 3 questions, to throw the ball to a random participant who will be the next speaker.
6. Ask additional questions if it’s necessary – if a team member hasn’t verbalized any problems, ask him or her “How confident are you in completing this task today?” This question helps participants to better understand their statuses and presents an opportunity for team members to clarify objectives and feel confident in their assigned tasks. 
7. Run meetings at the same time – do it even if half of the participants haven’t turned up. It teaches them discipline and shows that it’s important for you to run daily meetings. That’s why a scrum master can’t be late.
8. Appreciate participants at the end of daily standups – it puts your team in a good mood first thing in the morning and increases motivation. Don’t turn this rule into a formality.

*Gamification is using game mechanics (raising experience, fights with monsters, the game field, etc) in non-game processes like work, life, study.

The summary

A scrum master is required for team coordination.

It’s not even about observing scrum rules, it’s all about the need to have an advocate of project goals in scrum meetings. The correspondence of the core product architecture, team building and creating a productive atmosphere in the company with constant growth are the main jobs of a scrum master.

Scrum meetings are a great tool for measuring statuses and project promotion. Daily standups not only help the team to stay in sync but also help to solve problems, are a place to learn to set goals and to be responsible for the overall result in front of the group.

The post Scrum Master: How to run Scrum Meetings with a Team? appeared first on Focus.

Scrum standup is a daily meeting that helps product teams to be more effective and analyze their routines. The recommended length of the meeting is 15 minutes, however, it depends on the team size. All members of the product team participate in the standups, not only the product owner and scrum master.

Scrum meetings or Daily Standups might help product owner to optimize development and prepare the product for the launch without delays and issues. It’s a beautiful theory. In reality, effective and short scrum standups can turn into nightmare routine where no one understands what’s going on in the team. How to run really effective daily meetings?

The main goal of the meeting in Scrum is sharing the statuses of the work for each member. During the standup, everyone tells about the current situation in the job to align the team and create a total vision.

There are no tables and сhairs on the scrum meeting. It’s called standup and attendees participate while standing to make this meeting as short as possible. Difficult and long questions might be discussed after the meeting between a team leader and member who has the issues, but not with the whole team.

Nowadays, scrum meetings sometimes are considered outdated and are criticized by some companies. However, scrum standups generally are very popular across development teams. Product owners claim that standups help them to manage the team more effectively.

Running effective scrum meetings is not a unique skill for product owners. It’s possible to understand how it works, practice, and improve its power. The following recommendations will help product owners and scrum master to run the best standups.

8 simple recommendations to run standups effectively

1. Define the meeting format 

In Agile, standup meetings run while the sprint that is usually 2-4 weeks period. The team should specify the set of features and requirements from the backlog for the iteration.

An important goal of the daily standups is defining a timeframe for the meetings and remember that standup is not a usual meeting or retrospective meeting. 

2. Invite the team and define the roles

The best solution for the scrum meeting is the team of 8-12 people. It simplifies communication and makes it short. 3 main roles should be on the scrum meeting:

• Scrum master, who plays as a coach and helps the team to optimize processes and jobs;
• A product owner or product manager who prioritizes the features and communicates with clients and experts;
• The development team consists of members with different roles and responsibilities (developers, marketers, support managers, etc).

Other people like remote employees or partners might be are invited to the meetings. However, it’s better to restrain the total number of the meeting as it improves trust and confidence inside the team.

3. Choose the type of standups

There are two main types of standups you could run. The first one is the usual type for a team in an office. People gather in a room in a specific time and run synchronous standup. However, not everyone might be able to be in the office at a specific time, especially, it doesn’t work for remote teams. 

The second type of standups is an asynchronous meeting where the team uses a messenger or a special tool like Standuply or Focus for running events. At this type, team members send answers to the bot and managers receive daily reports with all information in Slack or web application. 

4. Pick up the time and place

There are no special requirements for the place where you can run standups. The board with stickers or displays with a special tool can be useful for the meeting but it’s not crucial. You need an empty area for offline meetings or communication software for running standups online. For running the asynchronous standups you might use special tools from the previous rule. 

Experts recommend running standups each day at the same time. Morning is the best time for scrum meetings because it helps everyone to prioritize daily goals. 

5. Participate while standing

Meetings where you participate while standing helps to focus on the main goals and run the event shortly. Some creative teams run standups while they doing some exercises like planks. You should choose the best option for you to run short and effective meetings.

6. Follow the day agenda

Daily scrum meetings follow 3 main questions that everyone should answer:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you going to do today?
• What are the blockers or obstacles?

Answering these simple questions, the team can find out the problems that they must solve or optimize. It’s the best way to align the team and get areas for improvements. 

Don’t forget to take notes and share information with the team or use bots for standups that made it for you.

7. Simplify the process

It’s useful to visualize day agenda that everyone could see current tasks. You might use a kanban board that helps to prioritize daily goals and statuses. Here are a couple of examples of how you can use boards:

It’s crucial to see deadlines, the list of tasks your team should do, and what should you decline while it’s not a priority. In this case, the product owner should use some of the prioritization techniques. 

8. Communication and partnerships

Remember that daily standup is a valuable time where everyone participates in the process. Each team member should share the most valuable information for the team. The right communication is a core for productivity. A Scrum Master or Product Owner should stop useless communication to make the meeting more helpful.  

Avoid usual mistakes

There are most frequent mistakes on the scrum meetings: 

• A long period of waiting. You should explicitly follow the timeframe. Start standups in the same period. Don’t wait for everyone. If someone is late – it’s his or her fault.
• New ideas and topics. Daily standups are not about planning. It’s a meeting for sharing the statuses of the work.
• Vague and long speech. Long and vague speeches reduce the efficiency of the meeting. Focus on things that matter to the company and team members. 

There is no secret sauce in these recommendations, but it can help you to build high-performing meetings in a scrum team. Thinking about the team and focusing on the main things, the product owner can run useful and interesting 15 minutes meetings where everyone wants to participate. 

To run asynchronous standups and retrospectives, you can try Focus that helps teams stay in sync and work better together.

The post 8 Key Rules on How to run Better Scrum Meetings appeared first on Focus.

Who is a scrum master?

Scrum master is one of the underestimated roles in Scrum and Agile. A lot of teams combine a scrum master role with other roles like a developer or a Q&A engineer because they don’t know how to give to a scrum master a full-time job. 

It’s the most popular mistake in the scrum master role. Companies generally say, “We know that team members should create the product and work hard. We should help each other and be flexible. We also think that a product owner is a crucial member of the team because he defines the product vision and communicates with clients. What’s about a scrum master? What does he or she do?” 

In this scenario, a scrum master usually becomes a secretary, which is a very boring position, isn’t it? A scrum master moves cards on the scrum board and thinking about making coffee to the team while they create the product. Familiar situation? ?

Another popular mistake usually happens in enterprise companies when someone brings a scrum master role in the team and starts to combine his or her main job with scrum master activities. Companies, which decided to go to scrum, say, “We need to have a scrum master to implement scrum, right? But we can’t use a developer or Q&A engineer for that, because they should create the product.” In this case, a company chose a shy person who combines his main job with a scrum master role because he doesn’t have great skills in development.

Talking about it, Zuzana says that the strong scrum master is not considered as an optional role, who can’t add solid value to the project. The scrum master must be considered as a person who produces efficiency team growth. The goal of scrum master role is building not a good team, but building the high-performing team. In this case, the scrum master is the guy who has a very fast return on investments. 

Scrum master responsibilities

Let’s talk about scrum master responsibilities. There are many things that scrum master should do and all of them participate a lot in teamwork. If a scrum master combines several roles in the team, then each role should be separated from the main. A scrum master should choose only one role at a particular time. A scrum master, in contrast, who doesn’t separate his roles, can’t be good in all of his or her roles. 

Scrum master responsibilities include things such as: 

• Motivate the team to take responsibility and align each member across personal and team goals
• Provide transparency and partnerships
• Remove obstacles by encouraging the team to be proactive
• Understand agile and scrum mindset and be always learning
• Keep agile values and help other people to understand scrum values
• If it is necessary, protect the development team
• Help the team to be more effective
• Facilitate scrum meetings and standups

As you can see, a scrum master has a lot of responsibilities. However, it’s hard to compare with any traditional role and many people can’t understand what’s scrum master doing the whole day. 

Outstanding scrum masters should always improve their soft skills and be great listeners. Also, they should be experts in Agile and Scrum. The perfect scrum master has work experience in a scrum team. On the other hand, a scrum master will struggle with agile implementation in the company without this experience.

Scrum master goals 

What’s the main scrum master goal? It’s building a self-organizing team and produce self-organization as a key value of the company in all areas. Self-organization creates engagement, responsibilities, and make people more engaged. It helps the team to find its solutions and make the team more effective. Self-organization is a key indicator of a high-performing team in a long-term period, not in the short-term. It allows improving processes, communication, and partnership. Self-organization creates high-engaged employees and helps people to build a solid team with aligned goals and identity.  

If a scrum master focuses on other goals instead of building a self-organizing team, then he or she turns out to be secretaries, consultants, managers, or just not valuable team members who “doesn’t know what to do”. 

Remember

• Scrum master is not a secretary;
• Scrum master is not a ‘not necessary role’, but a person who creates a high-performing team;
• Scrum master is an agile and scrum expert who truly believe that agile and Scrum are ways to success.

About Focus

Focus is a teamwork software for scrum teams. Focus helps your company to run scrum meetings and stay in sync.

The post Great Scrum Master appeared first on Focus.