The Daily Scrum
This will be the first in a series of ‘mini-blog’ posts, small bite sized content with hopefully small nuggets of knowledge, inspiration or motivation.
Its a question that gets asked a lot… “Do we have to do it today?”, “Can we skip today?”, “Why is it everyday?”, especially for teams new to the concept.
The answer is simple…. Yes.
Why Everyday?
You might hear that “We talk every day anyway, we sit so close to each other we all know whats going on”. I don’t think this is the case, and the discussions that take place during the day are definitely not the same. Are you really that confident that everyone on your team has an equal input to every conversion, problem or solution?
The daily scrum is a time where all team participants get to meet and each have an equal, and relevant time to discuss progress. Even if a team is close and most do know what is going on… this means the daily stand up will be a lot shorter; definitely not something to complain about.
The Exceptions
I think you can only really get away with not having a scrum every day for the following:
- You combine it with a different meeting, for example if you have a sprint planning in the morning, the end of this meeting might take up some discussions on what people will work on first, priorities etc. It wouldn’t make sense then to do a daily standup considering most of the details are probably already discussed.
- Remote Teams, sometimes it might be difficult to hold daily stands ups, especially when teams are located in different time zones. If these calls generally go on late in the afternoon/evening for one of the teams — to keep morale high it might be a good idea to skip this one and not keep everyone back and preventing them from starting their weekend!
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