It’s the Little Things in Scrum That Count
There’s an amusing article called “How I Stole an Office and Fixed our Daily Scrum” by Aaron Conoly on the Scrum Alliance website which describes how he improved their daily Scrum meetings. One of his tips for improving the daily scrum was to kick the boss out of the meeting. Once that happened people started working as a team, sharing information and getting things done! Imagine that! Is that what we call “self-organizing” in “Scrum”?
Failing to conduct daily Scrum meetings are often times a point of failure for teams moving toward agile transformations. Some teams see meeting everyday to be cumbersome if they are distributed, on different timezones, or too large. However, the “daily scrum” is the heartbeat of Scrum and critical to the success of using a scrum framework in software development. Other guidelines Aaron recommends to make the daily scrum successful are to hold the meeting early in the day, time box it to no more than 15 minutes, and have everyone attend and participate. Oh yeah – and don’t invite your boss to the meetings!