Scrum doesn’t talk about stand-ups, but about Daily Scrums. I’ve used the term “stand-up” here instead of “daily scrum”, as this is a more loosely used term among teams. For this post I use the two names interchangeably.
Here’s a common complaint I’ve observed from people across different Scrum teams — “I don’t really get any work done until the afternoon!”
This isn’t just spoken by developers either. It could be designers, digital strategists, testers, marketers… basically anyone on your team.
Now why is this? Well, let’s see what happens in a hypothetical day for our imaginary developer Claire.
Claire, gets into the office, says hello to her teammates, makes a coffee and sits down by 9:10. She checks her email and logs in to the teams messaging board for any updates to stories she is working on. After a couple of replies Claire can finally get started on where she left off yesterday on the Mini basket story. It’s now 9:30.
After just getting focused on her core task a reminder pops up: Stand up in 15 minutes! Claire remembers to get a meeting scheduled with Trevor to ask about the Mini basket wireframes. It’s now 10 o’clock and time for the stand-up.
Everyone gathers together in the usual place and lists off what they did yesterday and what they are working on today. Claire mentions that she is planning on speaking to Trevor to move on with the Mini basket story. There’s a couple of conversations which drag on longer than they should and the stand-up overruns to 10:25.
Claire goes back to her desk and fires her editor back up. Around 10:50 her friend Barry comes over and asks if she’d like to get a coffee. By the time Claire is back at 11:00 she looks at her clock, realises the time and knows she’s got maybe 20 productive minutes before her next meeting… and then it will be time for lunch.
The problem for Claire is finding enough time to get into a proper rhythm to do the kind of deep, creative work needed. It’s demotivating when 8 hours have gone by and not even half that time can accurately be recorded as working on your task.
Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
When your rhythm is interrupted you lose time because of context switching between tasks. This is nothing new, I originally read Joel Spolsky’s blog post on this topic way back in 2001! Add in the time taken up with meetings, interruptions and distractions (David from Sales sending funny memes again) and it’s no wonder that teams find it difficult to be productive.
Since this post is about the Daily Scrum there is one change you can easily do to help your team. Move the time of your stand-up.
You might have observed a couple of distractions that Claire could have resolved herself, like perhaps switching off notifications. One of the most common time sinks is scheduling meetings in close succession throughout the day. This removes people away from their work and introduces more context switching, rather than giving people the time they need to completely focus on the task at hand.
People do need to take breaks, walk away from their desk and talk to each other — so I’m not advocating locking up your developers in a room until they finish everything.
Most Daily Scrums are scheduled by either the Scrum Master or a Project Manager, who may be tasked with running several stand-ups, and they try to fit in all of them in the morning. This is especially true when Scrum Masters are assigned to multiple teams. While this may be to the benefit of one person it can kill team productivity. It shouldn’t be the job either of the Scrum Master, the Development team runs the Daily Scrum, the Scrum Master is there to help as a facilitator.
In my experience there are two times in the day that are best for Daily Scrums: either straight away in the morning or just before the team breaks for lunch.
I don’t recommend the end of the day because people are getting tired and wanting to go home. Also, in practice impediments are often better discussed earlier in the day. You may ask the question doesn’t that apply to leaving the Daily Scrum to the middle of the day? If something is truly a blocker, a team member should feel comfortable raising it straightaway with the team and/or the Scrum Master. Don’t wait for the Daily Scrum to report impediments!
In the majority of successful Scrum teams I’ve worked in, the Daily Scrum has been no later than 9:30 — just enough time to settle in before starting a new day. Once a Daily Scrum time gets scheduled later in the morning you could be eating into your team’s peak productivity time. For example, I’ve been deep in conversation about a problem with a colleague for half an hour when they sighed and said they would have to pick this up again later because they needed to go into their 10:30 Daily Scrum.
Of course there may be reasons why everyone cannot be available first thing and people may need to attend more than one Daily Scrum. So, as an alternative I have found scheduling 15 minutes before everyone in the Scrum team takes lunch, gives people the time they need without getting in the way. Hungry tummies will also help keep the discussion short and on time!
Where people have cross functional skills and are on multiple Scrum teams doing 1 morning and 1 lunchtime Daily Scrum has tended to be more effective than disjointing their morning.
These are my general rules of thumb. What will work best for you and your team should be a group decision. Just like meeting your Sprint goals is a team effort, so should be the decision of when to hold your stand-up. So if you hear your colleagues saying “I just can’t find enough time”, consider raising the question “what is the best time for everyone to attend stand-up”?