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Hello everyone. Welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast. Today I'd like to share with you some personal tips about the daily scrum. And what is a daily scrum? A daily scrum is an event, of course, very related to the scrum method that aims to inspect and synchronize what you must do in that specific sprint. For example, let's suppose that you need to have ten different products or deliverables in that sprint. That is two weeks. I'm just using this as an example. So basically what do you want? You want to understand an update Okay? What is happening with these ten different deliverables? What is the backlog? What is impeding us, blocking us from delivering that, and how can we solve this? And of course, many times, the Scrum Master facilitates it, but it's not a requirement. Okay? But it's nice that you have someone that will facilitate and make sure that the daily scrum focuses on really how do I remove the impediments to deliver what I'm supposed to deliver on that specific sprint.
Some tips. The first one it's not a status report. Many people think that the daily scrum is someone that you need to report to people to say, Oh, I'm doing this, I'm 50% on. It's not a status report. It's a discussion very focused on what must be done and what is blocking us from doing the work we need to do to deliver this sprint.
And this drives me to the second thing focus on the current sprint. It's very common that we start discussing one thing, and then this becomes another thing, another thing, and suddenly you are discussing something that will be a focus of a sprint that will happen three months ahead.
And I'm not saying it's irrelevant, but I'm saying that the main objective of the daily scrum is to understand what we need to do today to make sure that in two weeks, for example, we will deliver what we were supposed to deliver. So focus on the current sprint. Many times when I face this kind of challenge, what I do, is I take a note quickly in a Post-it note and put it on the parking lot, and I say, you know, let's take care of this later and not now.
My 3rd. It's about the timing. Of course, I'm not saying that you should have exactly 15 minutes or exactly 12 minutes, but my suggestion is that it must be short. I personally love the 15-minute time-box, and I always try to do standing up with everybody standing up, for example, the Sprint backlog in front of us. And, you know, it's 15 minutes. You know, people need to get the legs hurting and say, I need to get this done quickly, quickly. So usually, I do that. Of course, I know many of you who say will ask me, but I have a virtual team. How do we do that? We need to create this sense of urgency means if you have nothing to add, just stay silent. If there is nothing that you really will contribute to getting the job done on that day, just stay silent, you know? And this is the focus we try to do most of the time.
I try to do this in the mornings, something like the first thing in the day. Of course, again, if you're working with different time zones, this will be very hard. So what do you do if you cannot do it in the mornings? You should set a fixed time every single day. So every single day, you may say from 12 to 12, 15 Eastern Time, every single day is our daily scrum, and that's it. And it will start at 12, and it will finish at 12:15 and not a tape. And this is very personal. Okay.
You don't necessarily need to agree, but most of the time, I start my daily scrum discussing the work items that are almost done. Why? Because I want really to discuss an almost done today to make sure that tomorrow it's done. So what I want I want to really take that work that is 99%. But there is one impediment. Let's get it done fast. And this creates, I would say, a feeling of accomplishment. You know, you. Tick the box, and the next day, you say this is done. So I always start discussing this, and then, of course, I go to the others because this creates, I would say, this dynamic and this dynamic and this critical sense of urgency.
My final tip and this is not easy, but it's about transparency and openness. You need to be transparent.
This daily scrum is not for you to hide something under the carpet or, you know, take things out of the radar. No, what we want is to have this brutal transparency and openness. I always say kind to people in hard on the problem like we are. I always say your negotiating, and you need to have transparency. It's not something that one person talks about, and the others listen. It's everybody together. Say, What can we do to sort this out? In the end, the only reason to have the daily scrum is to remove everything that is blocking you from delivering what you promise on that sprint. That's it. If you can do that, you will do a magic daily scrum.
My final comment. I use the concepts around the daily scrum, even in projects where I'm not using Scrum, and I know, of course, I'm not using the same. Of course, if you don't have a sprint, it's a different dynamic. But the concept of standing up 15 minutes time box, you know, transparency many times I'm discussing, for example, a risk, and I'm trying to identify ways of mitigating that risk. And I do the same model and the same style of the daily scrum to sort out how I can remove that impediment that is making that risk acceptable for my organization. So this is just one example. Remember, this is a magic tool for you in your Swiss Army knife to deliver better results.
Think about that, and see you next week with another Five Minutes Podcast.
