Anyone who has worked with the Scrum framework will know that meeting is a “specialty” of Scrum.

The team talks to each other, gets stuck, debates a bit loudly -> calls the scrum master, holds the meeting to adjudicate (rather the scrum master will assist in generalizing the issues on the board) to help members understand and decide how to handle it). Resource between 2 competing teams (devices, servers, people, …), call the scrum-master to arrange ….

The reasons above are irregular meetings, while in scrum there are important meetings and are often held regularly.

• Sprint planning meeting: The meeting appears at the beginning of each sprint to scrum-team make an agreement with the PO about the work that will be done in the sprint and make commitments after the end of the sprint.
• Daily meeting: Meeting every day to greet each other, discuss what has been done and will do during the day.
• Sprint review: At the end of each sprint, scrum team members review the work done in the sprint. Can demo for PO or stakeholders about products / results made. At the end of the meeting, there will be an evaluation of whether the scrum has delivered on its commitments.
• Refinement metting: Usually set when the team needs to be described, explaining a new epic / product backlog. Usually during this session there will be poker planning activity to estimate (estimate) the tasks.
• Retrospective meeting: This is a meeting to look back together and make improvements to the existing “process” of work.

Within the scope of this article, I will introduce you to the topic: Daily scrum meeting. Hearing the name of the meeting, we know immediately that the meeting is at the beginning of the working day, what is hidden deep in this meeting, please continue reading.

Hold Daily scrum meeting

Participants

• This is a meeting that requires everyone in the team to attend daily.
• In case a member does not participate for any reason. The meeting is still proceeding normally.
• The absent member will present additionally to the PO or the executive / person involved in his or her job.
• The PO or other members may attend the daily meeting but only to listen and not play any role in the event.

Place

The venue usually chooses a “standing” position (in a circle) to facilitate communication between members.

“Standing” will help members focus.

Hold time

Time frame is selected based on the commitment of all team members.

But do not choose too early or too late. In my experience, choose the time after the members have filled their “hungry stomach”.

Operation principle

Each meeting usually only lasts about 15 minutes (if the team is too crowded, please split the team to ensure operation), there will be a person who plays the role of LEAD to take turns asking other members 3 question

• What have I done since the last daily meeting?
• What will I do from now until the next daily meeting?
• What difficulties am I having?

Common mistakes to avoid:

Daily meeting was turned into a general meeting

• A work progress report
• A discussion session to solve the problem.

So scrum-master / lead of meeting

• During the daily meeting, make sure each member only answers 3 questions.
• If there are issues that require “brain-storming”, let them resolve (immediately) after the daily meeting.

-> Doing so can shorten the time for 15 minutes and members who are not involved in brain-storming can continue working.

Daily meeting organized unreasonably

• Non-permanent venue: At the meeting room, at your work place A, friend B, …

-> Which leads to situations where team members will have to “run back and forth”

• Unreasonable organization time: For example, if the company works at 8 am, 8:05 am daily, … “Hanoi cannot hurry”, on rainy days, 8am to reach the company is a big problem. with the staff already.

-> Let’s delay the daily meeting time compared to the start time of the company a long enough to … make teapot, coffee cup, breakfast, go to the WC, … But also don’t be too late, let the members after the daily work is finished.

Daily meeting has no value

• The development team doesn’t see the value of the daily meeting.
• Members often report that there is no problem but the product is not as promised.

If the above two situations occur, the scrum-master or the development team must review the 5 scrum values ​​that have been applied correctly. Are members working on their commitments?

Daily meetings do not take place as a daily routine

Daily meetings must be done daily as a routine of the team.

If one member is absent, another member maintains and works as usual. To ensure “transparency” at work.

Improved Daily scrum meeting.

Motivation for the team

At the end of each daily meeting, the leader / scrum-master will tell everyone some nice sayings:

GOOD JOB!

Can you do anything for you / your friends?

Thank you everyone for participating

The saying will bring motivation to the team members in the new working day.

Save the information of the daily meeting

If you ask this question to developement teams, the answer is definitely: NO

But in the position of a Scrum-master, PO or technical leader, the answer is certainly: WANTED.

Use the Kanban board

The usual way for people to save their “statements” during meetings is to present them on the Kanban board (TODO LIST).

Kanban board is often used in scrum – team in the form of a hard board, divide columns and use colorful sticky notes to paste. Each color corresponds to a member or to a job status: Punctuality, overdue, difficult ….

At the end of each daily – meeting, leader / scrum-master will be responsible for taking pictures of the kanban board and sharing with other members of the group with the purpose …

Use the checklist template.

In addition to using the Kanban table above, in the process of working with the scrum-team, we have come up with a fairly efficient way to store data. Every day, members will update to a common excel file to answer 3 questions as below:

The input of data into the shared file is done before or after the daily session by the team unanimous and decided.

The common data file must be managed by scrum-master, technical-leader or PO and shared publicly among team members.

At the beginning, when deploying the software file, the team members were quite harsh because of the “naturally monitored” mentality, but after a few problems, it was necessary to report the weekly work summary (to test report). job, report on contract extension, report on salary increase), team members voluntarily … don’t complain any more.

Especially in the recent WFH, members found updating files easier to manage and follow each other’s jobs than online meetings.

Above is my view on the daily scrum meeting, maybe it’s right for us, not necessarily right for your team. Hope to receive comments from other scrum-masters. Thanks for reading my writing.