Meaningful Standups

Meaningful Daily Scrum (Standup meeting) happened when react and do something differently, according to the information in daily standups.

Otherwise, it just become status update. That would be tedious and I prefer just continue with my work.

This does not mean you should always change the plan, but you need to change the plan when new information arise and there are more optimal way to work.

If you do standups without changing any plan, let’s say for 1 month, that would mean your team plan is always perfect from the start.

That mean in your business, you do not need any agility. Planner always get it right from the start.

If that is the case, then so be it. You should considering stop doing standups and any Agile activity. It has no use.

Common problem is, it is hard to admit that initial plan is have probability of about 80% to be wrong.

It is hard to admit that, according to information today, we got it wrong in the start of the sprint.

It is hard to just say “I got it wrong at the start, let’s change”, very frequent, almost twice a week at average.

But that was initial assumption of the Agile. If we human are able got software plan right from the start, then why bother do Agile at all?

Agile culture need to allow everyone, including self, to be truthful and accept underlying assumption that human has limitation when it comes to planning ahead in software development. Planning incorrect and changing a plan in the middle should be accept as nature of software industry, without being interpreted as being incompetency.

This go both way, from the way management see software development team and expect to have everything planned and worked out, also the way software development team see business team and expected to have everything planned for multiple years.

Both need to be viewed differently. Both need to accept that there is no such things as perfect plan.

Otherwise, why bother being Agile. Waterfall and traditional way of management does have its place and can work pretty well too.

You cannot become Agile without accepting the most fundamental assumption of Agile Methodology, that’s no one, engineer, developers, management, etc, can have perfect plan.

Every plan will have a pretty high chance to goes wrong.

Once you accept this assumption, You will be comfortable to say “Hey team, I think we got it wrong, today let’s change something to make it less wrong” every single day in every single standup meeting.

And that is when daily standups have a meaning. It actually improve the way team work. Team will be very enthusiastic to have standup meeting.

Another common problem is, even if we know something fishy coming up, and plan is not going as expected, we do not know what to act differently.

That would come with experience, but at least, Standup meeting allow team to be aware first that something is not going as expected. Hence we can retro and make it better.

In traditional way of management, we neglect these problem as “accountability”, which basically mean, let the people who accountable for it deal with it.

That is still ok in Agile, to let the one who accountable handle the case.

What is not ok is, we should be transparently talk about this issue, instead of just buried those in the hand of the one who responsible for it quitely.

Talk about it in standups, retro, etc.

That is when standup have meaning, to surface a problem.