Daily Stand-ups: Workshop

Recently, after analyzing how we are doing on our daily stand up meetings I decided to run a small coaching workshop with the team. The purpose was to emphasize the value of a daily stand up meeting and figure out how to improve. In my opinion great place to run such workshops is a sprint retrospectives meeting. Everyone is already in the "learning mode" which makes the time right.
Here is a summary of the workshop:

• Open the discussion asking the team what value stand-ups have in their eyes. You will be surprised with the answers. Some folks will see certain benefits while others will see no benefits at all.
• Ask the team what the purpose of stand-ups is?
• Explain that daily stand-ups are for the team to:
• Daily sync-up: Be aware of the overall status (what's on track, what's behind, what's blocking, what the risks are, what new tasks were identified)
• Set direction and focus
• Perform a daily to weekly planning
• Share observations on how do our stand-ups look right now (our example):
• What I worked on, What I will be working on
• Some technical details of individual tasks
• Occasional planning during stand-up
• Occasional planning post stand-up
• Elaborate on how you'd like to see our stand-ups going forward:
• A place to self-organize on daily basis: For The Team, By The Team
• What I have accomplished since last stand up
• What I plan to accomplish by the next stand-up
• What needs to happen in order for me to accomplish the task (what blockers need to be removed, what coordination with others has to happen)
• This does happen on occasion, so I'd like to emphasize the value of this kind of stand-up.
• Problem solving: Parking Lot for post stand-up discussion
• Move from "Story telling" to "Headlines"
• Next move on to discussing the actual examples. Story telling exercises are the best because they create mental hooks that help people relate to these stories in the future easily. For each example ask the team following questions: 
• What is good about this stand-up meeting example?
• What can be improved?

Examples:
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Example 1
John: Since yesterday I was working on the new report; Today I will continue working on this report; Nothing is blocking.
Mary: I have nothing to test in this sprint yet, but I have some bug retests so this is what I've been doing pretty much in the last few days and planning on continuing with retests until User Story 123 is ready for testing.
Avanti: Yesterday I was fighting the Web Server configuration issue. Eventually I've found that there was an issue with database connection polling settings. Basically there was not threads pooled and this was affecting the throughput and therefore end user response time. I have found several articles and forum discussions about it and have left a message in few threads. Just few minutes before the stand up meeting I've got a response from some guy with reference to Weblogic article about suggested threads defaults in development vs. production.


Example 2
John: Yesterday I was working on a new report. I've implemented the UI based on the UX that Ivan designed and started implementing the query. This was a big task and I wasn't supposed to complete it yesterday. My plan for today is to complete the query and to complete the report. Mary should be able to get a first look at it later tomorrow.
Mary: Since yesterday I haven't done any work on this project since there is nothing ready to be tested. From what I just learned, John might be done with development of the new report by tomorrow, so today I will write the test cases and will review them with John.
Avanti: Yesterday I was fighting the Web Server configuration issue. Eventually I've found that there was an issue with database connection polling settings. I'm not blocked anymore and will plan on completing the configuration by tomorrow.


Example 2 - the next day
John: Since Yesterday I've completed the new report and have reviewed the test cases with Mary. Today I will be working on a spike about new authentication mechanism and plan to spend 2 days on it. By tomorrow I plan on reading framework documentation and setting environment.
Mary: Yesterday I've spend most of the time on bug retests and also had test cases written and reviewed them with John. I'm waiting on a build to perform the actual testing. I expect that I will have some time to look at any other completed functionality so folks, please let me know if there is anything for me to look at.
Avanti: Yesterday I've completed the web server configuration and it's ready to be replicated to our staging areas. Today I was planning to start working on US 234, but I need someone to bring me up to speed on it as I was on vacation during grooming and planning sessions.


Example 3
Alex: Yesterday I've completed the last task on US 323 which was to update the design documentation. Today I'm going to switch to US 454. No blockers.
Garry: Yesterday I continued working on US 323 and I keep getting these runtime errors that didn't occur even few days ago, so I'm pretty much stuck. Today I'll continue debugging this.
Jose: Yesterday I was working on the new interface to the provisioning system. I have completed this interface and will call a quick meeting to show it to few folks: it's important that we'll get it right, so I'd like to get some feedback early. Later today I have several meetings so I won't be able to complete much by tomorrow, although I'm planning to at least start writing the detailed design for the upcoming US 676.
Cathy (Scrum Master): Garry, what help you might need to move forward with this task?
Garry: I'd like to have another set of eyes with me looking at this issue as I'm going crazy here.
Alex: Garry, let me help you out here. I think it makes sense to declare victory on US323 before looking into next user story.
Garry: That would be great!

Complacency is evil

6th sprint is on and it seems like Agile framework is being followed and we are doing everything we should. Every retrospective we identify that one thing that we are going to improve going forward and planning on improving it in the next sprint.

1^st problem we are running into is constant deprioritization of improvement tasks over tasks related to the value bearing stories. The team doesn’t seem to have a problem with it initially as they see delivery of committed story points as a top priority for them during the sprint. The end result is not obvious at first, but few sprints later it becomes more evident: the improvement backlog starts forming and every sprint we have a carry-over of the improvement items.

2^nd problem is an increasing focus on tactical improvements that are the obvious obstacles to progress, while Agile values in general and SCRUM framework values in particular are losing focus and this is not obvious to the team. Our sprints look like small Waterfalls with massive acceptance at the end (usually during the last day of a 3-week sprint) and yet at retrospectives the team doesn’t pick this area as worth improving. Our daily stand-ups are all about the status and slew of technical details, and not about the daily planning. There are some good exceptions, and we do have post-stand-up planning meetings occasionally, but the actual stand-ups are not delivering the value to the team as they should in my opinion.

My plan is to hijack the next retrospective session and run it in a completely different manner. I’m going to turn it to a learning session where we will get abstracted from the tactical improvements and will get back to the framework values and will place the improvements we identify at the top of the backlog. One of the reasons we have got to this point is complacency that we all fall victims to at some point in time. That’s the reason to have a dedicated person (beyond the SCRUM master) to frequently inspect the way teams work and identify these complacency smells.