How to have a great Daily Meeting

Why and how to have a great daily meeting with your team.

Daily meeting, daily stand up meeting, stand-ups, Kanban meeting or Scrum daily, whichever the title may be, is the simplest and most important ceremony a team (in IT or any area) can perform.

The reasons for having a great daily meeting:

• Togetherness — The meeting and regular alignment of the team members strengthen the identity as one team, apart from guaranteeing that everyone is rowing towards the same objective.
• Group Accountability — In self-organized teams, the responsibility for the results is of everyone. It doesn’t fit in this scenario that old thought: “I did my part”. If there is a stagnant task or something is not flowing well, it’s the responsibility of everyone in the team to self mobilize and resolve the issue. The visual management generated through kanban and the open communication through the daily meeting enable the team´s reaction speed.
• Refined Coordination — These same open and fast communication assure that the team members avoid work wastage, for example: “I didn’t know you built this feature like that, so I must make a system change to avoid a new bug, thankfully we talked about that.”
• Focus on a few tasks — Daily meetings oriented by tasks (cards) help the team to keep focus on a few tasks at a time. In other words, there is a bigger probability to respect the limited WIP (work-in-process). Remember the famous phrase: “Stop starting, start finishing”.

How to do a great Daily Meeting:

• Be fast and objective.
• Create the habit, same place or same schedule(if everybody is remote).
• Everybody participates, especially the remote ones.
• No need for the leader to initiate, the team is self-organized.
• Use the tasks as a reference.
• All tasks have to be represented in the kanban (physical or digital).
• It’s not a check-up. The focus is on tasks, not on the team members.
• Start with the right side items (done) and walk the board to the left side items (to-do or backlog).

• Ask the following questions:

What do we need to do to finish this item?
Is there some blocked item? If so, let’s focus on that to unlock it.

• Before pulling a new item from To-Do, verify whether you can help to finish another in progress item or to deal with an impediment.
• People who are not part of the team, but have interactions with it, are welcome to participate.
• Do not fall into the temptation of going deep into the details about business rules or specific technical issues, if necessary schedule another meeting apart to deal with it.
• Last tip: make work agreements with the team and leave them explicit.

If you don’t perform these ceremonies yet or don’t do them in the right way, share these tips with your team.