How to Abandon the Daily Stand-up Hamster Wheel Without Going to Scrum Jail

Do this to tame the Daily Scrum.

We should just rename the Daily Scrum to the Daily Whip.

What set out to help teams align and focus has become the dread of developers across the world.

• A rude interruption to crucial flow moments.
• Meaningless updates from teammates you barely know.
• Anxious waiting in line to justify your worth over the last 24 hours.
• Worthless status updates to managers parading as Scrum Masters.

The Daily Scrum has become yesterday’s punching of the time-card. You have to do it to get paid and have worth in today’s feature factory line incarnation of Scrum.

You think this is me trying to be dramatic. But I’m not. This is the reality for many of the Scrum Teams I work with today. Don’t you see it, too?

Why is the Daily Scrum such a grind?

I have to admit, it hasn’t always been this dreadful.

The rhythm of the daily stand-up of Scrum used to energize me and my teams. I remember having fun with laughter and a team cheer to end each one. It was a time to come together and kick-off the day with focus and camaraderie.

The Daily Scrum used to enhance a team.

But the engine of efficiency has clawed its way back in control. And sucked the life out of it.

Workers love the concept of a self-organizing team, but managers hate it. So, in turn, managers seek control and demand transparency into progress. This has slowly caused the Daily Scrum to morph into a daily status update.

The Daily Scrum now feeds the insatiable beast of more, better, faster, and cheaper.

We have also lost the original intent, and dogma has taken over.

Take the standard three questions recommended for many years by the Scrum Guide. This treats teams like a collection of individuals. We go around round-robin style and give individual updates on:

1. My work yesterday.
2. My work today.
3. My impediments (rarely any).

Stretch…Yawn.

And Scrum Masters started acting like misguided dogma police.

They cut off fluid discussion to fit in an arbitrary time box and began to fixate on the mundane. For instance, notice, I have referred a few times to the Daily Scrum in this article as the “Daily Stand-up.” I can’t count the number of times a Scrum Master has corrected my butchering of the name of this sacred event.

So long, fun. So long, teamwork. Hello, painful meeting we have to slog through every single day for the rest of our team’s life.

The current state of the Daily Scrum mirrors our pitiful state of low team collaboration. Unless we fix our teamwork, we will be stuck in this hamster wheel of misery.

Here’s the irony.

The idea of Scrum comes from the sport of Rugby. It’s based on the notion of moving the ball downfield as a team. But what we have today is a collection of individuals all playing a game alone on separate fields.

In what style of Rugby would this ever make sense?

This is why we have Scrum Masters acting like project managers to coordinate the chaos. It’s why we have to give updates on our status. It’s why we don’t know our teammates.

And it’s why the Daily Scrum of today sucks.

What should be a useful tool in the team’s arsenal has now turned against the team. It reinforces the teamwork void.

How to Fix the Daily Scrum Without Going to Scrum Jail

So, where do we turn for answers?

We can actually unearth great advice by looking at what the 2020 Scrum Guide^1 says about the Daily Scrum:

• Developers can choose the structure and technique.
• Collaborate continuously; no need to wait until the Daily Scrum.
• Its purpose is to inspect progress and adjust toward the Sprint Goal.

This mirrors with my experience of what works. My teams use the Daily Scrum as a tool, not a whip. And as with any tool, it should be there to amplify performance, not weigh you down.

Let’s take each of these points in turn.

1: Developers, it’s up to you how you run it.

That’s right. This is not the Scrum Master’s meeting. It’s for and run by the Developers.

But how many times have you seen Developers running the Daily Scrum? Go ahead and think about it. I’ll wait…

It’s OK. You can stop searching the far reaches of your mind. I don’t think I’ve seen a team in recent memory where the Scrum Master was not large and in charge of this meeting.

It’s time we break this pattern and get back to form.

As a Developer, imagine you now have complete control. Think of the things you could do with the stand-up:

• Poll the team on the right focus for the day.
• Skip it and keep focused from the day before.
• Mobilize on a critical technical issue weighing on the team
• Sketch out the play and figure out how everyone will contribute
• Reflect on what worked the day before and how to amplify it today
• Drink coffee and joke around before the hard work of the day begins

The sky’s the limit. You decide.

Make the Daily Scrum work for you for a change.

2: Embrace teamwork to remove the need for status updates.

Something magical happens when you work together all day as a team.

I find you don’t have to integrate solo work back into the team mind. And you don’t have to coordinate independent work or update a Scrum Master. You plan as one and move as one. Developers have complete autonomy over what they do, how they do it, and when they do it. Synchronization happens without trying.

So, what’s the magic trick? It’s a disappearing act for external management and control.

You don’t need anyone to herd the cats if all the cats are moving together by choice.

Scrum has always been about self-managing teams (even though it’s rare today). Scrum Masters should help the team remove obstacles in the way, not become an obstacle. But that’s what they do by taking charge, mandating status, and assigning work to feed the factory line.

No joke, I had a Scrum Master who locked a team in a room until they finished the Sprint Backlog on the last day. Teams don’t need this kind of “help.”

Self-organization is a natural side effect when teams work as a unit throughout the day. No outside influence necessary.

Say goodbye to status reports in the Daily Scrum. Say hello to a cohesive, aligned team in charge of itself.

3: Keep it simple: Huddle, orient, and run the play for the day.

Finally. Let’s do a real Daily Scrum.

With all the extra fluff out of the way, you now can get down to business.

You have one mission: Make progress toward the Sprint Goal.

This should be easy since you are working as a team. I notice that when my teams collaborate throughout the day, in-flight work reduces. They gravitate to having one item aligned to the Sprint Goal in progress at a time. They focus on finishing, not starting, which simplifies the Daily Scrum even further.

Lowering work-in-progress removes excess and clarifies the pursuit of the goal.

Most effective stand-ups (it’s OK, no Scrum Master is watching me use that word) huddle on one of three objectives:

1. Continue work in-progress from the prior day.
2. Start new work (because we finished our work the prior day).
3. Solve an urgent problem impeding the work in-progress.

Because the team focuses on less work in flight and needs no status updates, I’ve seen it finish in 5 minutes. And if continuing work from the prior day, the stand-up may get skipped altogether.

This is a Daily Scrum—plain, simple, to the point, and useful.

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That’s it.

Don’t you feel lighter thinking about removing all the burden weighing down today’s stand-ups? The happiest teams I’ve worked with run the Daily Scrum this way. They don’t get wrapped around the dogma axle. And they don’t worry with needless overhead and coordination. The team is in charge, not the tool.

1. Developers run it.
2. No more status updates.
3. It’s the team’s huddle; that’s all.

The best part? It’s by the Guide. And you won’t go to Scrum jail for that.

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References

1. The 2020 Scrum Guide, www.scrumguides.org, 2020 Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber