This Shouldn’t Be a Status Meeting … Improving the Daily Scrum
How can I keep the daily scrum from becoming a daily status meeting? But if we are all answering three questions then who is supposed to be asking the questions? If we are gathering to give our updates on these three questions every day on what we are doing then that sounds like a status meeting to me – what am I doing wrong?
These are all questions that I have heard new scrum masters ask. The daily scrum seems like it should be the simplest thing we do, right? The team self organizes daily for a time box of no more than 15 minutes and talks about three things: What I did yesterday, what I am going to do today, and what is standing in my way.
So, why is it so hard? In my experience … mindset. Often, scrum masters learn a process to implement but they don’t recognize the mindset that must change in order for the process to have any value. Being self organizing and collaborative, like being agile, is a mindset. It’s not just something you do – it’s something you are. It’s something you become. It’s about individuals and interactions over process and tools. What I’m finding is that when teams are struggling with the daily scrum it’s about them putting the process and tools over the individuals and interactions.
