A while ago, I was asked for advice on how a team could improve efficiency on standup meetings. The team was growing, and their standups were taking an increasingly amount of time. I didn’t have much time looking into why this happened, so I simply suggested they could try walk the board instead of using the traditional Scrum meeting.
As it turned out, it didn’t have much effect. People on this team are usually responsible for one ticket (user story) each, so they all end up speaking anyway. I took a closer look, and realized their great team spirit might be of the reasons why their standups takes too much time. They like working together, there are many outgoing personalities, and they like solving issues directly in standups. In addition to sharing information and solving problems right away, the standup meetings function as a social meeting place.
This is all fine with me, actually I would even encourage it, as long as the discussions are relevant for most people, and they finish up within 15 minutes. As soon as the team grows, however, not all discussions are relevant for everyone. So, the question is, how to improve the efficiency without killing creativity and good team spirit?
In similar situations, we have had to establish some ground rules to add some discipline and structure in the standup meeting. One way of doing this is by establishing a “parking lot” next to the board.
Whenever a discussion starts, we take a collective responsibility to end it gracefully and note the topic down in the “parking lot”, so that the discussion can continue after the standup meeting. Putting names of whom should participate in each discussion, can help determine the most efficient order of dealing with the topics afterwards. Here’s an example:
This usually works quite well. It helps us focus on the meaning of standups, which is sharing status and relevant information – and it shortens them down. You should try to identify problems in the standup meetings, but you don’t need to solve them all right away. To make this work, you need to add some amount of disciplin, but only with rules the team have agreed upon.
If the team is involved in creating the rules, then you have made the first step building a collective responsibility within the team. I believe there’s subtle, but important, difference by how individuals interpret “ending a discussion” vs. “postponing a discussion and create a new arena for discussing the topic”. We don’t want strict rules to get in the way of good team spirit, do we?
Please share your tips for efficient standups!