Three Tips for Running a Virtual Daily Scrum
The 6th principle of the Agile Manifesto says,
“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”
Now we are asking, whose teams share the same location or even the same country? Even before COVID have taught us to change our way of working, we already had remote teams in play. Teams struggling with different timezones and countries. The pandemic made the problem even more important.
Lets have a look how the pandemic and remote work have changed or even will further change the way of working for the daily scrum. It’s one of the meetings that has a set timebox to 15 minutes. It is important that we try to maximize the value for the team in the daily event even more.
Here are 3 tips for running effective daily scrum remotely.
1. Same time, same location
This is crucial for the teams that are located in one office, so there is a consistency in the daily scrum. For remote teams it is an easy task to find the same location, like Zoom, Slack or MS Teams meetings. However it is hard to answer the question after same time as the team members might be located in different time zones. If it is the case, try to take the middle of the difference, so every member has to sacrifice. If for example ones have to get up earlier and the other have to stay little late, so all members have to give a little and not only one group. Try to make clear that its just 15 minutes. In the last case when you can’t find a spot try to go for an asynchronous daily scrum.
2. Coffe breaks for personal time
In the world of the home office, we can still feel isolated. If we see each other in the office day by day we share a lot of informations with each other we don’t notice. However in the remote world it is not the case. As the communication is only limited to meetings that should be productive and efficient, where is no place for such kind of information sharing. In this case 5 minutes before or after the daily for personal use is a real gift for the people. Don’t try to stop this ocnversation as they are needed and this simulates somehow the conversations while getting coffee, or waiting at the water cooler.
3. Camera on!
In the real world we interact not only verbaly. We also use our face and body to communicate, not everyone is a good body language reader, however our brain knows how to interpret non-verbal communication. In this case we still miss one communication channel and only use our voice. In this case try to turn on the cameras and play with the faces. Keep up your team turning on the camera and don’t miss out the opportunity to read yours colleagues faces.
This are not the only 3 best practices, you can find a lot of usefull tipps around on the internet. However this 3 are creating a good foundation on that you can build and experiment with.
I think we as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches should have an understanding of the tools we use. Frameworks might be helpful, but by knowing why we are doing some events like Review, Daily Standup,or the most hated by all ”Retrospectives”, we can achieve much more.I will continue writing about the so-called tools and why they exist and what problems do they solve.Hello, my name is Alexander and I am a founder of Agile Instinct.
If you want to know how agile your implementation of scrum is, just visit https://agile-instinct.com and apply for a free agile assessment. We will identify 3 most important impediments and create a way together with you for a better implementation.
