A Story of Daily Scrum Improvement-the Impediments

In the "A Story of Daily Scrum Improvement-the Observations", I shared my findings on the daily standup meeting of the Scrum team, which is the meeting time is shorter than expected, I've also shared a few possible reasons that caused this issue. It is a strong indicator to me, that some changes would be required. But before jumping to the aspects of making changes, let's take a quick look at what could be the problems of those findings and the impediments resulted in to the team because of those problems.

On the surface, the short meeting time reflects insufficient communication between team members, but there would be more underlying it:

• Prejudicial to the team building

Every body who has experienced in the Scrum knows the three questions to be answered during the daily standup: what you've done yesterday, what will you do today, and what is the obstacles that you met (or what're the obstacles that you expect to be removed by somebody in the team so that you can deliver what you planned today?). However, those questions are not as that easy to answer. Because it really need each individual to think about how to present the answers, and the team to be really care about the answers from each individual speaker.

 

If each individual speaker just simply following the statement pattern such as "I did x, y and z yesterday, and I will continue to do z today", and then there's no questions. Firstly, the update reveals no more useful information, and secondly, people does not care about each other if they don't care about who's speaking and what is being spoken. With that kind of carelessness, the links between team members are weaken.

• Blear the goal

The key difference between a group of person and a team is there's a goal shared by a team. A Scrum team would share a common goal for each individual Sprint, as well as the whole product development life cycle. Without adequate information exchange between team members, it would be hard for people to understand where they're, as a team, for the goal they're destining. Worse, they may not see what could be the problems ahead of them, so that they could take any actions, as a team.

• Destruct the self-organization

Self organization is the key characterisc of a Scrum team, however, self-organization is not as simple as just have the team sits together, give them an assignment and check the result after a certain period. It is more about the interactions between team members, and eventually it is about the communication. As the complex system engineering tell us, the key factor of a system to be self-organized is the nonlinear mutual interactions between the system elements. With the communication pattern mentioned above, the interactions between team members is linear, there's no feedback, no intensive interaction, therefore, the self organization level of the team will be degraded, or destructed.

 

• Bad to the team collaboration

Without the in-depth information exchange in that daily standup, the meeting itself would be nothing else as an empty ritual. People feel very low energy from the meeting, which make they dispirited, for the whole day, as most of the time this would be the first meeting to start a day. The poor short meeting makes the poor collaboration within the team.