The most efficient daily scrum ever!
Before starting this story, let me share with you the definition of a daily scrum by scrum org: “The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.”
Now a little bit of context. I was working for a worldwide company with a hybrid model of remote and allocated teams. The company’s goal was to make a huge agile transformation, starting with the allocated teams and then going with the remote ones. We started this transformation and after a few months, the company started getting results in all the teams that changed their mindsets and way of work, so it was time to start with the remote teams.
An important thing about this transformation was that as soon as a team starts using Agile, they can stop working with the PMO team and actually stop following all the rules of the PMBOK while they kept all the necessary processes to keep the certifications of the enterprise. After about seven months, we got 45% of the teams working with an Agile mindset and some frameworks that adjust their needs.
Deal Breaker to create the best Daily Scrum
It’s time to talk about the current title of this story, and not only the context of this Agile Transformation, when the PMO started seeing that the volume of teams was rising and they were losing teams that followed the PMBOK processes, they presented a plan to the VP of innovation the proposal of including Agile team to the PMO to make more efficient Agile… and surprise they approve this change.
The first days of this change were kind of the same, until the PMO decided that the best way of measuring Agile was actually creating the best Daily Scrum. The first step to this was giving a score from one to five to determine the maturity of the Daily Scrum. If you know anything about Agile, you should see that something is wrong here, but that is not all. After making this decision, they found a problem here, and nope is not what you are thinking, they found that the problem was that they needed to have some parameters to measure the Daily Scrum. They found three parameters that will help every team in the company, and I will share with you these five parameters:
1. Focus. The team must completely focus on the PBI’s included in the Sprint. They get the full score, but if anyone mentions anything about something else, then they lose points in the grade.
2. Time, if the daily duration was ten minutes or less, the team gets the full grade here.
3. Importance, this was the most important part for the PMO if anyone mention the name of a person, places, context or anything different to blockers the team loose this grade.
And you might think, what the heck you were doing during all this? I was actually helping the remote teams because the PMO got Scrum training to be the Scrum Masters of the allocated teams, and they chose to create all these changes. As soon as they tried to do this to the remote teams, I pushed back these changes, and they decided that time would decide the best approach. Spoiler alert, this doesn’t work because it killed all the collaboration in the Daily Scrum and they started to have a Daily Status Meeting.
A few weeks later, they told me that this metric was no longer optional in any team, and I would love to continue this story, but I actually changed company, because they decided that they were mature enough to do the rest of this transformation with the PMO team.
Thank you for reading, now you know the secret to having the most efficient Daily Scrum ever!
