Scrum issue #33: Daily stand-up turns into a report meeting to the Scrum Master

That’s an issue I faced many times with different teams. At a certain point a team either gets so cohesive, each team member knowing precisely what everybody is doing, or totally the opposite, indifferent to the work of the others, that a daily stand-up turns into a report meeting to the Scrum Master.

First let’s summarise the basics for non-practitioners:
The Daily Scrum is a short meeting (usually not exceeding 15 mins.) held on a daily basis and each team member should answer the following questions, regarding the Sprint stories/items:

• What did I do yesterday
• What am I going to do today
• What impedes me

There is a lot of criticism and murmuring related to the meeting being ineffective or even useless, for example:

1. I collaborate with the team all the time and I always know what’s going on
2. My work doesn’t depend on other team-members so stand-ups are waste of time for me
3. The Daily Scrums aren’t held at a suitable time for me
4. Stand-ups feel like reporting to my first-grade teacher

And here is what I usually coach and answer to those:

1. It’s great you collaborate so well in the team. The Daily Scrum could also be used as a motivational planning and committing to tasks on a daily basis. Also the transparency for the non-team members is essential in terms of progress, risks and issues. The team is not meant to work in an isolated environment.
2. Working on a story or item independently is an issue and potential risk in any Agile team. Yeah, I know – there is no other database guru in the team but you could involve some of the developers so they have an idea (at least) what’s going on with your story or tasks and would be able to somehow help or take over if you are not able to work on the items. As mentioned above for teams – team-members should not (under any circumstances) be isolated / whether or not it seems efficient to do so.
3. And it’s up to the team to choose the best time for all and stick to it. After all, if we can’t do a short daily meeting successfully, how are we supposed to organise well, plan, develop and deliver comprehensive software?
4. The meeting is what we do out of it. Focus more on sharing than reporting, planning than chitchatting and risk identifying than rushing in.

The good practice for Daily Scrums would be:

• Use same place, same time, every day (except the Sprint planning day)
• Stay focused on the Sprint items - look at the board and the burn-down chart
• It’s a stand-up (to keep it short... and you well-fit)
• The focus is on collaboration, daily planning and identifying risks and challenges
• It’s not a report meeting to the Scrum Master

As a Scrum Master the best you could do is not act as a focus-person to encourage the team members to talk to each other and not to you. You could even sit-down (yes sit) outside of the circle and take your notes if needed. The idea as usual is to back-off and create space for the team to fill-in and self-manage/organise as much as possible.