Benefits of Daily Stand-up Meeting
We have been applying Scrum practices for months. At first, we only adopt some Scrum practices in our works but recently we apply Scrum process totally in our works. One of the most important practices impact to us much is stand-up meeting. Here are the differences before and after we apply daily standup meetings:
| Before applying daily standup meeting |
After applying daily standup meeting |
| Many delay tasks are raised in the weekly meeting |
Any task are delay are recognized immediately by team daily |
| Some problems are raised in the weekly meeting only and late solutions impact to project's progress |
Most of problems are identified daily and team active the solve problems |
| Team members are passive |
Team members become more active |
| Project status is updated weekly |
Project status is updated daily to all team members |
| Members do not keep their tasks, which are assigned by PM, in mind |
Member have right to plan their own works (not PM), and they easily remember what they plan to do |
Instead of writing tasks report at the end of week (this way place project member in passive way, they only record what they are assigned to do by PM), each project member spend 15 minutes/day (75 minutes/week) to answer three questions "What have you done? What do you plan to do? What impediments do you have?". The Scrum Master only set the goals to be completed in week and project members are freely to plan their tasks to complete their goals. This cause project member active to think what they do, and they manage their tasks in order complete project's goals not wait the instruction from PM. Before applying Scrum practice, we receive many complaints like "Members are not active in their jobs! They do not raise problems to us etc", after applying the Scrum daily meeting we can update the project status every day! And people active to solve problems. If you have not applied daily standup meeting before, you should try it soon!
There are some tips to make the daily standup meeting more effectively:
· Do not try to solve problems! Only related people seek the solutions later not in daily standup meeting.
· Limit the number of members less than 7 members and they only focus into 3 main questions, no more and no less.
· Scrum master deliver the project information briefly (news, project change etc). Any message not belong the daily meeting scope should leave for weekly meeting or another group meeting.
· Daily meeting should proceed at the beginning of day, not middle or very late. Do not let the short meeting impact to current employee's works
