2011/03/30

The Information in Daily Stand-ups

I know, many people have written down whats the importance of the Daily Stand up meetings in scrum, but there is always something new happening which makes you write down a few pointers for whoever wants to read it.
Sometimes when I attend the daily stand ups as a listener, it seems like they are doing the Daily stand-ups just because they are asked to do it, i get the sensation that they are not able to extract the value out of the information which is being exposed in these meetings. In some cases these meetings are converted in status update meetings but these cases are rare.
The information which is provided should be useful, in most of the cases i see that people explain I worked on "X" project yesterday, will continue today and no blockers. Is this really useful for the TEAM, in my opinion its not, may be a bit useful for a Product owner but no sufficient. we don´t need to give a status update here guys, we need to inform the team mates and Scrum master on what i am working on, what i will work on and if there is anything which can block my work.
I have heard people saying but i answered the 3 questions..... its not enough since the team and the Scrum master and most important product owner doesn't have a vision of what tasks were done and what is next in line, the member of the team which takes care of the testing doesn't have info on what he or she should start preparing to test.
So how do I see that information provided in the daily meetings should be.
1) I was working on task x1 and g2 yesterday, x1 is done and is ready for testing, g2 is taking more time that expected due to "abc" issue.
2) will continue working on g2 i expect to finish it in next 4 hours and then will take up task j4.
3) "abc" issue which was blocking is resolved, task n5 might get blocked if the design is not submitted by client today EOD.
So now the information provided here is telling me exactly which tasks to expect that they will be done, that one of the tasks presented a blocker yesterday but its resolved (and i know to whom to talk to get more info on solution) and that one task planned might get blocked (this is a message for SM and PO) and needs to be resolved beforehand.
There is a take away for each actor from the information provided.
As a product owner i know what is health of my project, i can know if the planned functionalities would bedone done by end of the sprint (having the scrum board in the same place where the daily meeting is done, also helps) and that i need to move things to get the page design and related material for the planned task to start and in turn finish. As a Scrum Master i know that there were impediments which were solved and they will need to be documented. and communicated in Scrum of Scrum. And as a team member, i get the info of who is working on what and what and this will helps me to find out dependencies of my tasks on others.
This information becomes useful when all this processing of the information is done.
Horowitz, Lois quotes "Not having the information you need when you need it leaves you wanting. Not knowing where to look for that information leaves you powerless. In a society where information is king, none of us can afford that."
Lets try to give correct information and get most out of the information which is being provided during the daily stand ups.

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