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Daily Stand-ups

There are certain core Agile practices that you may already be performing as a team – and if not they are very easy to start.  Direct from the Agile Practice Guide, and by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance, this is a guide to daily stand-ups as they relate to Agile and Agile project management.

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What is a daily stand-up?

Daily stand-ups are short meetings to update the team on what we’ve done since the last meeting, and what we intend to do before the next meeting. The intention is also to help remove any blockers and make sure everything is flowing nicely. In that way a daily stand-up is a short meeting that’s used to micro commit to each other as the whole team. With the whole team approach we’ve got everyone involved in the one place – it’s a cross-functional team. Everyone necessary is in the one place to produce this product or complete this project, so when micro committing to each other and uncovering and removing blockers we’re raising them in this short meeting called the daily stand-up.

This just helps us ensure that work flows smoothly through the team, and this is a key phrase. Flow is a phrase from Lean, or the Toyota Production System, where we are wanting to improve the flow of work and making sure that everything is flowing nicely.

A daily stand-up is usually time boxed to 15 minutes, it’s nice and sharp, nice and short, and we usually walk through the Kanban board. If you haven’t looked at that before it’s a board, a visual representation of the work where we’ve got our cards that we’re working on, our features. We’ve got the backlog on the left and we’ve got “done” on the right and it moves through the flow of our steps – maybe test, in progress, sign-off – they’re moving across the Kanban board. We walk through that Kanban board during the stand-up as well just because we have a visual representation of where everything is up to.

The team facilitator role that we saw in the Whole Team Approach could be the Scrum Master, could be called the project manager, but either way the role is based on servant leadership. Anyone can facilitate but usually we’re using that servant leadership role to facilitate a daily stand-up, and ideally it’s going to be in person. A stand-up could be virtual if you have your team members across the country or across the world – in other words we could use the phone, everyone could dial in and have a meeting and walk through a virtual Kanban board say (for example on Trello or JIRA) but ideally it is done in person because then we have the whole team in the one place, co-located. That makes communication nice and easy.

In our team we usually have three to nine people, this is the most common scenario. In iteration based Agile, where we’re iterating every two to four weeks and usually releasing an increment that a customer can see, feel or touch so they know whether we’re on the right track – in that iteration based Agile everyone answers the following questions, usually in a round robin fashion. We just go around the groups we say:

• What did I complete since last stand up?

Maybe we move one of those cards across the board, or maybe it’s complete and we can take another item from the backlog.

• What am I planning to complete between now and the next standup?
• What are my impediments or blockers?

Call out anything that is blocking you – maybe Bob was not available and he is the only one who has the information that you need, or maybe there’s something that just really cannot be solved, it’s very complex and it’s going to need more time, it’s going to need a spike as they call it, so that we can really delve right into this and really investigate it.

We usually don’t solve these problems during the stand-up, because we’ve only got 15 minutes in this meeting, but we can raise them and take them offline, and maybe someone says “I actually know someone who can help you here,” or “I have the information that you need.” to solve it over the day.

Basically by getting everyone in the one place we’re swarming around any problems as they arise – so we’re raising the problems and we’re swarming around them, everyone has an input into them and they might be able to solve that problem because everyone is there, everyone is listening and even though we can’t solve them immediately we can take them offline and solve them during the day, hopefully between now and the next stand-up.

That’s another Lean principle, if we’re going back to the foundations of where Agile came from, and Lean and the Toyota Production System and many other different ways of working that have formed Agile over the years basically we’re swarming. We reveal problems. People think that problems are a bad thing, but no! Problems are a wonderful thing.

First of all, problems are a sign of life, and they’re a sign that things are getting done. But we really want to reveal them, we don’t want the problems to be hidden because then they just fester away and become bigger problems. So during this stand-up, by raising the blockers we’re revealing those problems and because everyone’s there were swarming around those problems to solve them quite quickly rather than letting them fester for weeks, this is a great Lean principle and something that really helps us improve our team over time.

And that is the core Agile principle of Daily Stand-ups.

– David McLachlan

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