Running Effective Daily Product Delivery Meetings

Stand Ups and Daily Scrums are a couple of ceremonies that have been borne out of agile process frameworks.  They are there predominantly to keep the product delivery team up to date with activities and highlight any problems or issues that need to be addressed.

The Daily Scrum is where the development team will get together and talk about progress on their work tickets and issues / impediments that then need to be resolved.

The Stand Up will typically have stakeholders and a tech lead or project manager in talking about work tasks and raising some questions that need to be answered to unblock activities.

In practice, these two sessions can easily become status updates on tasks and avenues to highlight that an issue or clarification for a task has been raised and until solved, the task is blocked. Teams tend to go through the motions of the ceremonies, forgetting or maybe not even understanding the purpose and goals behind them.

Meeting up daily as a team is important. If you find yourself reflecting on the usefulness of your daily, by evolving your chosen ceremony and focusing on the outcomes, there is a better way to come together, move forward with momentum and operate as a more collaborative team.

Foundations for a successful daily meeting

To be successful in transforming your daily meet up, some underlying activities and ways of working need to be in place.

The following is a list that outlines activities or practices that the team should have underway or be working towards.  These are shared understandings by the team and the context from which the team operates in their daily meet up.

• The product delivery team (the team) are committed to meeting at the same time each day and if the session is a remote session, they attend the session with the camera on.

• The team are always working on the most important item in the sprint/iteration to help the team be successful in their goals.

• The team have an ethos of ‘stop starting and start finishing’ i.e. they work together to get the most important items completed and shipped before picking up new work and starting too much that the team cannot complete their sprint successfully.

• The team are open and honest with each other and not afraid to call out where they need help and assistance.

• The daily session is facilitated by individuals in the team.  Each individual has the opportunity to run the session and responsibility rotates week to week.

• The team can choose to work with sharing their team work board to highlight the activities being moved forward through the day or they can talk to them around the table.  There should be a clear understanding of the sprint/iteration goals and hence the team should feel comfortable working with or without digital aids (e.g. Jira, Trello, etc).

• The team spend more time focusing on the daily goals ahead than updating the team on what they worked on yesterday.  Before each daily commences, the team will have updated their work board and be bringing to the daily their plan for the day to discuss with their colleagues.

• If / when the team has shipped code, they bring any updates on any production problems the team should address into the stand up.  The Product Manager will assign further investigation/resolution into the workload and discussions will take place after the daily finishes.

• The daily should be a fixed time period – say 15 minutes.  If there is any long discussions in the daily, the team will park the discussion and organise themselves to address after (with the appropriate people .. not all the team).

• If anyone is unable to attend the daily, they should provide details of what they were going to be working on for the day/will be working on for the day prior to the session and the team will take that into account.

• The daily is open for others to join however the 'spectators' are there to listen and be aware if they need to assist in any of the daily activities that are being planned.  They can offer their support to the team through letting the team know they can work with them after the daily (at some point in the day).

• The team pull the work down from the backlog assuming the most important items are at the top of the backlog.  Backlog organisation by priority is the Product Manager's responsibility.

• The team can suggest items for colleagues to work on when they are looking at what to do next, e.g. help out a colleague to complete a priority item or which one to take next.

  
  

What does a successful daily product delivery meeting look like / feel like ?

A great daily session is where the team is clearly focused on pulling the ongoing items of a sprint/iteration forward and they are jumping in to help each other out where there are issues. The session is talking about what the team can get done, not what each person is working on as a status update.

Typically a daily session will feel energetic and focused as it is about momentum and success.

If the team recognise that a particular activity is not moving forward at the pace they hoped it would, collectively they should agree on who can assist getting the task completed or moved past where it is currently stuck.

In the event the session starts to get into a longer discussion about a particular activity, the team can call a halt to the discussion (interrupt, that is ok) and the team needs to park the conversation until after the daily – noting that they are trying to move forward on the activity in the daily session versus during their day.  This is a fairly natural digression and comes with practice to a) recognise when it is happening and b) park until after.  Remember that the broader team is on the call and a 5 minute diversion will cost say 35 minutes of time (if there are 7 people on the call).

Generally a good stand up with also have some team banter, there will be some small talk at the start while people are joining a call, perhaps more on a Monday or on a Friday. 

A daily might start with the team reviewing some metrics or telemetry with the Product Manager.  If something has been recently released, it is good practice for the team to be committed to the outcomes they are striving for in their product delivery.

Potentially the team may use a term or word to finish their daily, i.e. indicate that the session is finished.  At that point, if there are any immediate follow ups, people can arrange themselves for that.

When does a daily start to not be effective?

There are a few indicators that highlight the daily may be going off the path it is meant to be on:

• Individuals start to talk about technical activities/tasks; the team needs to keep the conversation/update at a higher level and focused on the use case and how much of the specific use case may or may not be completed over the day. Technical conversations or considerations can be discussed after the daily.

• Individuals start to update the most senior person in the room;  typically this happens more in a physical daily setting than in a remote one.  There is a tendency for the individual to not look at his/her team as they are updating on the activities they are planning to move forward with in the day but address the senior person.  The daily session is for the team, not for a spectator.

• Stories start to get broken into more and more tasks and roll over into later sprints.  This is an indication that the user story hasn’t been defined and broken down sufficiently in the first place and this would typically be addressed in the team retrospectives (and an agreed user story refined if there is time in the current sprint iteration itself). 

  
  

To wrap up

There is no fixed recipe for a daily session but the above helps outline what success can look like, what foundations need to be in place and things to look out for that can make your daily sessions less effective.  Don’t be afraid to start somewhere and take the opportunity to continually improve together.  The daily is an enabler for the team to be successful and so should evolve in line with the teams growth and maturity.