We all learned that the scrum guide prescribes the daily scrum or scrum daily stand-up to have a fixed 15 minutes timebox, no matter how big your team is (of course, your team should be only around 3-9 people) and no matter how long your sprint is.
A problem usually arises when you finished your first sprint planning and have your scrum daily stand-up for several days. When the story starts moving and people start cooperating and discussing, the daily stand-up becomes longer. As a scrum master, you know that it is supposed to be 15 minutes, but seeing how your team works together makes you happy and you let it slide. The next day, it happen again, and again you let it slide. Until it becomes a habit.
Before you know it, your daily stand-up is now at least half an hour, sometimes even a full hour! People start complaining and think that the stand-up is a waste of time, they don’t feel motivated to join the stand-up, feel like it’s an obligation that distracts them from actually getting things done. And worst, they stopped coming.
If this happened to you, then you need to start doing something to fix this.
An important mindset for daily stand-up is that you will do this every day, so you need to make it useful, enjoyable, and not make it feel like a chore.
In this post, I will share some tips on what works based on my experience to limit your daily stand-up to 15 minutes.
Communicate to the team about the timebox
A scrum team is supposed to be self-organized, we want them to understand why we do anything. It is also important to share with the team about your objective to have a 15 minutes daily stand-up.
The best moment for this is during the sprint retrospective. I usually bring this up on the retrospective because retro is the ceremony where we can be anonymous and people come with an open mind. If you discuss this during retro, you will also have time to ask for other team members’ opinions so that all can understand and agree why we want the stand-up to be 15 minutes max.
Some of the arguments that you can bring to support the idea are:
- Having the stand-up too long waste everybody’s time, having a shorter stand-up frees up your time
- Not all issue or detail discussion needs to be heard by everyone
- It is prescribed so in the scrum guide
Remind on each stand-up that this ceremony is only 15 minutes
Now that you have communicated your objective and get buy-in from the team to have a 15 minutes stand-up, you need to still constantly remind the team that the stand-up will be only for 15 minutes.
When you open the stand-up, say something like “Thank you for attending today’s daily scrum, this event will be for 15 minutes, and as usual, I would like everyone to take turns and share to the team what you did yesterday, what you’re doing today, and is there anything you need help with”.
Discuss details outside of daily stand-up
Some people like to hear their voices. They tend to take up lots of time for themself when doing a daily stand-up. For cases like these, you need to speak up and tell them to please make it short.
When they start discussing things in too much detail, you can cut them and ask them to get to the point due to our limited time.
Solve problems outside of daily stand-up
Similar to when people discuss details, sometimes other people chip in when they hear a problem and start to troubleshoot on the spot.
While this is a good mindset to help each other, the time is not appropriate.
You can cut in and ask the team to let’s solve the problem after the stand-up. Better yet, make it a rule that all problem solving will be done after the stand-up, privately between the parties involved.
Don’t do demo during the stand-up
Another thing that I sometimes encounter is that a team member suddenly does a demo when sharing what they’ve done. This is worst when doing the stand-up online as people can easily share their screen.
When this happens, you need to step in and remind them to not do a demo and save that for our sprint review. If they need to show someone else how to do some things like how to use an API, ask them to do it after the stand-up.
Use the sprint backlog as guideline
I never use this myself, but I’ve seen scrum team that opens up the sprint backlog or kanban board during the daily stand-up.
This might help the team to focus on what needs to be said and not go off-topic.
I don’t use this because when we open the backlog, people tend to go over every item, even unimportant once, and it might add time to the stand-up instead.
Give timebox for each person
This is a bit drastic as some members might have more to discuss because they are handling more tasks, but you might want to try limiting the time for each person.
If you give a limit for each person, it will be easier for each team member to know when to stop.
Say, your team is 5 people, you can give 3 minutes each to talk.
Stop the stand-up once the timebox is over
I never do this as I think that the information shared at stand-ups is important, so I’d rather let it run longer rather than having less information or having someone not talking.
But if you need to make the stand-up to be 15 minutes, you can be strict about the timebox and close the meeting once the 15 minutes is up. This can also be some kind of shock therapy to the team so they will finish faster next time.
What have you tried to keep the daily stand-up to be 15 minutes? Did it work? Share in the comments.
