The main purpose of the Daily Scrum is for team members to make and follow-up on commitments to one another that work towards the team’s shared sprint commitment. If your Daily Scrum has become unfocused, too long, or otherwise ineffective, here are seven ways to get it back on track.

1. Do it around the task board. Have team members point at stories and tasks on the task board as they talk about their work. This keeps the focus on work for the sprint and makes it obvious when the talk becomes unrelated to the sprint.

2. Change the questions. In “One Word Can Change Your Daily Scrum” I described a way I like to change the three Daily Scrum questions to focus the team on getting things done.

3. Don’t show up. If your Daily Scrum has turned into a status report to the ScrumMaster, try taking a few days off. Let the team report to each other instead of you. Aaron Sanders has more here. Less dramatic ways to have the same effect are avoiding eye contact or stepping outside the circle. But sometimes dramatic is necessary to shake things up.

4. Don’t talk. If you’re not taking sprint tasks, you don’t need to answer the three questions. Emphasize that by not talking at all during the Daily Scrum. Use non-verbal communication when necessary, but keep your mouth shut.

5. Use a parking lot. There are legitimate things for a team to talk about in the morning that don’t fit the tightly-defined purpose of the Daily Scrum. Use a parking lot (i.e. a flip chart or section of a whiteboard) to capture those topics. Address them right after the Daily Scrum is over. You can even let team members add items to the parking lot outside of the meeting to be addressed in the next “parking lot time.” That way, they’re not trying to remember their parking lot topic when they should be paying attention to the Daily Scrum.

6. Actually stand. It shouldn’t be necessary for us to stand to have a short, high-energy meeting, but it really seems to help. If your team has started sitting for the Daily Scrum and it’s running longer than 15 minutes, it might be time to try standing again. Set an example by standing for the whole meeting, and maybe ask one or two influential team members to do the same. Combining this with #1 makes it feel less awkward.

7. Pass a token. Jason Yip describes how introducing randomness and play into the Daily Scrum by tossing a ball to the next person to speak can add energy to the meeting.

What else have you done to keep your Daily Scrum effective? Share in the comments.

Related posts:

1. One Word Can Change Your Daily Scrum
2. Making Velocity Granular Enough
3. A Common, but Bad, Idea

In my experience, the daily Scrum serves two purposes:

1. for team members to make and follow up on commitments to one another, and
2. for team members to raise and start resolving impediments.

Both these purposes are directed towards reaching the Sprint goal.

I started coaching a development team in an IT department this week. Most of the team is officially full-time on their project, but unlike the consulting teams I often work with, no one is ever really full-time on a project. There are production apps to support, people management issues, requests for technical help from other projects, non-project meetings, and a variety of other distractions.

Observing this team’s daily Scrums, I noticed that they talked a lot about what they did in the past 24 hours and what they would do in the next 24. Everyone seemed busy and could account for their time. But I had a hard time connecting their busyness to the work they’d committed to do in the Sprint.

So, I suggested a slight change to the three questions that I learned from Mishkin Berteig. Instead of answering the questions, “What did you do in the last 24 hours?” and “What will you do in the next 24?,” I had the team answer the questions, “What did you complete in the last 24 hours?” and “What will you complete in the next 24?” I recommended that they point at tasks and stories on the task board while answering the questions to keep them focused on the work for the Sprint.

There were some objections:

“But I’ll feel uncomfortable saying I’m not going to complete anything today…” To which I say, “Good. You should feel uncomfortable if you’re not helping the team follow through on its commitment for the Sprint.”

“But our tasks are too big to complete in a day…” “Many of them are. This will give you an incentive to make them smaller in the next Sprint, which will increase your visibility into the state of the work.”

Nonetheless, they agreed to try it, and I’m glad they did. The change in the daily Scrum with the new questions was striking. Conversation was more focused on their commitments. Since team members couldn’t use work from outside the project to show how busy they were, they were motivated to fight the distractions and find project tasks they could commit to. The few team members who are spread across multiple projects now can see clearly where the multi-tasking is hurting their commitments to this team.

If your daily Scrums seem unfocused, even though everyone has lots to talk about, consider changing the questions to change the team’s behavior. Just one word can make a big difference. Try asking each other:

1. What did you complete since we last met?
2. What will you complete before we meet again?
3. What impediments are keeping you from completing something?

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