Agile daily standups are one of the key opportunities to maximize your team’s productivity. Yet, I’ve seen so many teams that have ineffective standups that are a complete waste of time and leave everyone feeling frustrated. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way.
With the right strategy, you can turn your daily standups into an excellent opportunity for your team to collaborate and move work forward. Here are some of the best tips I’ve learned to supercharge your Agile daily standups.
Agile Daily Standup Tips: Keeping It Short and Sweet
Without proper structure, agile daily standups can easily devolve into inefficiencies. The key to ensuring they stay efficient is to make sure the meetings don’t run at all. Therefore, keep the meetings to just the three questions: What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Are there any impediments?
Keep strict time limits on the standup. From my experience, 15 minutes is a good maximum limit for most teams. Many teams also find it helpful to use a visible timer as a reminder to keep things moving. This timer is a psychological reminder to team members to self-regulate their time.
Start the meeting on time, no matter who is there. This practice promotes punctuality and shows that you respect everyone’s time. After the first few times, team members who are habitually late will shape up if they know they can’t just “catch up” and will miss important information.
The meeting becomes instantly more interesting and helps that person feel more important, which benefits daily standup attendance and engagement if nothing else. Implementing agile best practices can significantly improve the effectiveness of your daily standups.
Enhancing Team Communication in Agile Daily Standups
Active listening: The standup is a chance for each team member to update everyone else, so promote active listening. This will develop a more collaborative team and minimize duplicate updates.
Useful visual aids: Kanban boards, burndown charts, and current sprint backlog visualizations are just a few examples of visual aids you might use. I’ve noticed visual aids help teams better understand the state of a project.
Teach team members to deliver updates in 30-60 seconds: Providing a brief update will ensure everyone remains engaged and that the standup moves quickly.
Discuss blockers immediately after the standup: If you let blockers linger, you will slow the project down. Instead, hold a brief discussion at the end of the standup to resolve any blockers.
Build a supportive culture: Help create a culture where team members want to help each other solve blockers. This builds a more collaborative team. Utilizing agile communication tools can further enhance team communication during standups.
Maximizing Productivity in Agile Daily Standups
Focus on progress, not status. Anything is better than what I’ve observed many standups devolve into—a robotic list of to-dos. Instead, ask the team to share what step of progress they’ve made.
Identify and solve blockers immediately. As soon as someone brings up a blocker, address it then and there. Assign someone to help, or schedule a new meeting. * The parking lot method is an excellent solution to this problem. This solution allows the team to capture these topics on another day. This ensures the team stays on track during the standup, but ensures nothing important is forgotten.
Revisit yesterday’s commitments. This rule encourages accountability and helps you spot if someone tends to consistently underperform or overcommit.
Focus on team objectives, not individual tasks. Remind people how their work helps the team achieve the sprint goals. This slight mindset shift significantly increases motivation and collaboration. Implementing effective agile task management strategies can help in maximizing productivity during standups.
Remote Agile Daily Standup Best Practices
Selecting the best video conferencing tool is essential for remote standups. Look for features like breakout rooms and screen sharing. These features make communication and collaboration more effective.
Use the same virtual background for all team members. This creates a feeling of togetherness and reduces distractions.
Visual updates are often more effective through screen sharing. I often use screen sharing to show progress on a specific task or UI changes.
Appoint a speaking order to keep remote standups organized. This prevents any confusion about who should speak next and ensures that everyone speaks.
Ask team members to use the chat for quick updates or if they have a question for clarity. This makes the meeting go a bit faster, and it also leaves a record for future reference. Distributed agile teams can especially benefit from these remote standup best practices.
Agile Daily Standup Tools and Techniques
Digital task boards: Most standup teams use Jira, Trello, Asana, Microsoft Azure Boards, and more.
Time tracking: Many teams use time tracking to see where they’re spending time. This helps more accurate estimates and better allocation of resources.
Standup poker: Many teams use standup poker to make estimations more fun. It encourages discussion and can catch potential roadblocks early.
Team mood meters: Many teams use a team mood meter to gather emotional context. This can help catch when the team is feeling overwhelmed or stressed.
Automated standup reminders and summaries: Many teams automate reminders and recaps of the standup. This ensures people don’t forget and creates a record of what was discussed. Utilizing agile tools can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your daily standups.
Addressing Common Agile Daily Standup Challenges
Late attendees are a tough issue, and I’ve found that the best solution is to simply start the meeting on time and ask the late attendee to share their update after everyone else has gone.
Chatty team members are another common problem, and I mitigate this with friendly reminders about the time limit. If it persists, I’ll pull them aside after the meeting and offer private coaching.
Engaging remote team members is extra work, but it’s entirely possible. Encourage remote team members to contribute and ensure they speak as much as anyone else.
When standup meetings feel like status updates to management, encouraging the team to collaborate and solve the problems discussed is an effective solution.
Team members discussing cross-team dependencies during the meeting will likely require additional meeting coordination. Consider assigning a liaison role or a separate meeting to eliminate this issue. Implementing effective agile communication strategies can help address many of these challenges.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Agile Daily Standups
Tracking meeting duration over time reveals efficiency trends. If standup meeting durations are consistently trending upward, it’s probably time to make some changes.
Tracking team velocity over time indicates overall productivity. High-quality standup meetings should result in consistent or increasing team velocity.
Tracking time to resolution for impediments shows how quickly your team is addressing issues. If your team is solving impediments more quickly over time, you’re likely improving standups’ effectiveness.
Regular team surveys can give you qualitative data to indicate how employees feel about the daily standup meeting.
Tracking sprint goal achievement rates can tell you how effectively daily standup meetings are aligning your team. Higher goal achievement rates likely mean you’re doing a good job aligning through daily standup meetings.
The 2020 State of Agile Report found that 85% of Agile teams use the Daily Stand-up. This is a strong signal that you should optimize the daily standup meeting. Using agile metrics can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your daily standups.
Agile Daily Standup Anti-Patterns to Avoid
Converting standups to discussions is a frequent mistake. Reserve in-depth discussions for post-standup meetings to avoid derailing the standup.
Turning standups into status meetings for executives defeats the purpose of a standup. These meetings are for team members to coordinate, not for managers to oversee.
Missing standups frequently reduces the value of standups. Daily coordination is only effective if you do it consistently.
Allowing standups to turn into social hours reduces the impact of standups. While team building is valuable, it shouldn’t be at the expense of the team’s time.
Forgetting to resolve blockers makes the standup a waste of time. Always ensure any identified impediments are resolved quickly.
Tailoring Agile Daily Standups for Different Team Sizes
Small teams (3-5 people) can usually get through standups in 5-10 minutes. These smaller teams allow for more detailed updates if required.
Medium teams (6-10 people) will likely take the full 15 minutes. With larger teams, more rigid time management is essential.
Large teams (11+ people) might need alternatives. Use a scrum of scrums or a representative model to manage time effectively.
To scale standups, use:
- Scrum of scrums
- Representative model
- Asynchronous updates
Institute multiple standups if teams grow too large or become geographically distributed. This ensures you still get the benefits of small team communication as the team grows.
Parting Thoughts
Daily standup meetings are essential for Agile teams. I’ve personally experienced the impact they can have when done correctly. Just ensure you keep them short, relevant, and action-focused. If you apply these tips, you’ll convert your standup meetings into effective communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement tools. Your team will be more aligned, efficient, and prepared to solve any problems that arise.
