Standup: It’s where all the bodies are buried.
As a Scrum Master, you would have facilitated quite a few of these sessions in your professional career. You’ve probably tried various formats to help you guide your teams towards achieving their goals, but the topic I am covering here has nothing to do with that; this is purely about the potential value that you can get out of it.
Standup, daily scrum, daily sync, or whatever you might call it in your environment, this is THE meeting in my honest opinion. As a Scrum master or Agile Coach that is trying to drive continuous improvements, this meeting provides a snapshot in which an empowered team displays their ability deliver work.
Utilising this session comes in the form of observations. Generally speaking, the observations that you are making are ones that have an impact on the flow of work, i.e., the team ensuring that work traverses the board or system efficiently and smoothly.
I like to think of these observations as clues. At the risk of being overly dramatic, these clues help you solve crimes against flow :D.
Some ideal clues, but not limited to the following are …
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Bottlenecks
When multiple work items pile up in a stage of the process. What does the team do to resolve or not resolve said bottlenecks?
Tightly coupled work items
When an item of work is highly dependent on another work item. How does the team coordinate moving these items if the coupling was unavoidable? Was there a way to prevent this? As this is a risk, what does the team do if they pick up an issue on one of the work items, which would have a knock-on effect on the dependent items?
Reliance on a single team member
During the session, there is a team member who regularly coordinates the team’s efforts for the day or supplies solutions for the remainder of the team.
“Throwing items over the fence.”
Whether it be to another stage of the process or when waiting for an external team, before work can continue. What is the team’s strategy…and attitude, when dealing with issues when these instances occur?
Items aging on the board
When work stagnates and starts gathering “dust”, what does a team do once they have recognized that work is stalling, or do they even recognize it at all?
So what do you do once you have detected a clue? Sure, you can address them then and there, and that may work. However, if you want to make a meaningful long-term change within the context of your team’s environment, sometimes it’s better to …
