#6: How to make the Daily Scrum more effective with Julie Chickering

This week, Brian Milner is joined by Julie Chickering to talk about the best practices and common pitfalls to avoid during the Daily Scrum event.

Overview

Brian Milner and Julie Chickering discuss the true purpose of the Daily Scrum and how to make this 15-minute meeting more efficient.

According to the Scrum Guide, the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal, synchronize activities, and create a plan for the next 24 hours. Debunking the myth that “The Daily Scrum is a Status Meeting”, Julie and Brian share their first-hand experience of this misconception and show Scrum Masters how to transform the Daily Scrum into a purposeful and collaborative planning session led by the Developers, for the Developers.

You’ll learn how to get your Daily Scrum under control and discover new approaches to encourage productivity, accountability and collective ownership as well as Daily Scrum formats that encourage teamwork.

Finally, Brian and Julie dive deep into the struggles brought by remote working and the many alternatives to tackle this issue.

Listen now to discover:

-        02:00 - The purpose of the daily scrum and common misconceptions

-        11:00 - How to use the sprint backlog to prioritize work

-        00:12 - The importance of teamwork and striving for smaller stories that flow

-        14:56 - How to encourage developers to take ownership of the Daily Scrum

-        00:20 - Suggestions for Daily Scrum formats to encourage teamwork

-        00:22 - When to update items on the Sprint Backlog to benefit the Daily Scrum meeting

-        00:25 - How to encourage accountability and collective ownership of work

-        00:27 - How to monitor and assess unplanned work and forecast velocity

-        00:35 - Guidelines for problem identification and problem solving during the Daily Scrum

-        00:38 - How to adapt the Daily Scrum for distributed teams in a remote world

-        00:44 - The benefits of cross training

-        00:45 - The 16th minute concept

-        00:47 - Ken Schwaber’s clockwise scrum methodology

Listen next time when we’ll be discussing...

Julie joins Brian again to explain the true purpose of the Sprint Review and why it is a mistake to call this event a ‘demo’.

References and resources mentioned in the show

·       Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber

·       The Scrum Guide

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He’s passionate about making a difference in people’s day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Julie Chickering is a certified Scrum Trainer as well as a CST, PMP, PMI-ACP CSM, CSPO, and Path to CSP Educator. She believes that Agile practices are packed with potential — to enable business agility, and breakthrough results. Julie loves to help people implement agile even when the environments are messy, people are complicated, and situations are challenging. She brings real-world experience working with people at all levels to adopt and roll out realistic Agile strategies organization-wide.