Daily Standup

Daily Standup

A standup meeting is a short, focused, and regular meeting that can easily be done standing up. The purpose is to inspect the flow, collaborate with the team, offer and/or ask for help, and bring up impediments and blockers.

This meeting is not for resolving the issues or having a detailed discussion, it is only used to bring them up and then put the detailed discussion to one side. When detail discussions start, to help keep the focus on the standup, something like this can be said:

  • Can we take this discussion offline?
  • Can we put it on parking lot for now and come back to it after the standup?
  • Can we meet right after the standup and talk more about it?
  • Let’s find a solution rights after this meeting!
  • Could you guys work out a better way to solve this problem after the meeting?
  • Do you guys want to stay back after the standup to discuss in detail?
  • Do we need a separate meeting with additional audience to discuss this?

Kanban and Daily standup

Here are some ideas regarding running the daily scrums when using Kanban system:

Talk about the work instead of focusing about what each person will be doing.

So instead of asking the three questions:

  • What did you do yesterday?
  • What are you planning to do today?
  • Do you have any Impediments that are slowing you down?

Walk the board from right to left, and ask questions:

  • What do we need to do to move the work closer to done?
  • Who is going to do it?

Focus on noticing the work items that are not following the Kanban policies

Some of the examples are:

  • Work items in expedite lane, in ToDo
  • Work items in a column exceeding WIP limit
  • Multiple work items assign to one person at a time
  • Work items piling up in any of waiting column
  • New worked picked up, when there are in progress work items in waiting columns
  • Work item in progress but no one is assign to it
  • Work item sitting in same column for a few days
  • Blocked work items
  • Piling of work in testing column

Ask the following questions:

  • Is there anything you are working on that isn’t on the board?
    • It’s an important questions to have visibility of work, keeping the board relevant and be an information radiator of the work. Also it’s important to know that any work that is not on board is not a priority and if the work item is high priority them if should be on the board.
  • Are you working on the most important thing right now?
  • Is there any work on the board that is not clear or well understood?
  • Do you need help from someone in the team so get the work to finish line?
  • Do you see any opportunity of swarming to help the work flowing?
  • Are there any impediments or blockers that will impede your ability to keep the flow going?

Question that comes up in daily standup often

What should I be doing next?

Team should know what they should be doing next instead of being blocked waiting for someone to answer this question.

Rule of thumb to answer this question is:

  • Help finishing the work that is already in process (stop start, start finishing)
  • If there are any bottle necks, can you help in resolving them?
  • If WIP limit allow pull I work from top of the backlog
  • Handle some quick technical debt (some times we need to slow down to increase the speed

Go back to the Essentials page.

Reference: Kanban In Action by Marcus Hammarberg and Joakim Sunden

Tayyaba Sharif