Do your teams hate the Daily Scrum?
Well, you might be shocked with the advice I'm going to give you here, but I am going advise you to kill it.
Kill your Daily scrum.
Let me tell you what I mean.
I got called in to work with an organization.
And when I, when got in, the management of the organization, you know, I did a little intake with them before I worked with the teams and they said,
we're, gonna give you a warning.
We're gonna to give a heads up.
One of these teams has a lot of senior developers on it and, they're going to ask you to kill the daily scrum.
So I was a little taken back by that and I said, really?
Tell me more.
And they said yes, we're gonna, they're going to ask you to kill the Daily Scrum.
They've been begging us for a long time to Kill It.
they hate the daily scrum.
That's their number one thing.They bring it up in retrospectives.they just want to not ever do it again.
So I said, thank you for the heads up, I appreciate that.
And I wanted to go then and observe that team's daily scrum to see what's going on here.
How are they doing their daily Scrum?
What's their practice like?
Well, you can probably imagine what that daily scrum kind of felt like.
I walked in the room and I heard one of the developers say, All right, my turn.
Yeah, yesterday I worked on ticket 1937. Today I'm going to work on Ticket 1938. No blockers.
The second developer said, oh yeah, uh, My update for today is I've worked 235. Yesterday I am going work 236 today.
no blocker.
And this proceeded around the group of senior developers.
At the end of it, the Scrum Master in the room said all right anything else?
No?
Allright, great.
See everybody back here tomorrow.
Have a great day.
and everyone walked out of the room.
So observing that, I thought, wow, i can see why they hate this this meeting.
I can, see, why no one wants to do this, meeting so the first chance i had to actually talk with them about it.
i brought them into a room and said hey i attended your daily scrum today as you know i listened to it i i heard how you guys are running it and this might
shock you But my advice, and this might be contrary to what you think an Agile coach would say, but I'm gonna agree with you that we should kill this.
And their response was a little taken aback.
They thought, wow, that was easy.
I can't believe on the first day with the Agil coach, we were able to convince him to kill the meeting that he'd been trying to convinced leadership to
go for all this time.
I said, yeah, I know, it's a little crazy.
I'm a bit like that.
But here's the thing, right?
I need your help, because there's five other teams in this organization that I am also coaching and trying to help them get on track.
And you guys are the senior guys here.
It's not a bad example, but I don't want them to see that, hey, they gave into you, and then they're going to want me to give into them.
Do me a favor, right?
Let's keep this 15 minutes, okay?
So we have this 50 minutes every day, but I promise you we won't do a daily scrum.
Right?
We're not going to do the daily scram anymore.
Let us make use of that time though.
We are going be here for 15 mins every so that everybody else outside this room thinks we are still having it.
So let us come in here and I don't know, let's just talk about whatever we need to talk to get our work done today." And the developers looked at each
other and thought, yeah, that sounds like a great idea.
And so we did that the next day.
We came in and we just talked about the issues.
we talked what was going on.
Yeah, we needed to finish that thing today.
Let's help each with that.
Hey, I finished this.
What should I pick up?
How about you start this thing?
So we had this really robust conversation.
And I let this go on for three or four daily scrums because I wanted it to sink in.
I want them to get the feel of this, right?
And then after three of four of these, I actually stopped at the end of it and said, hey, before everyone leaves today, i have a confession to make.
What you've been doing the past few days, that is actually a daily Scrum.
What you were doing prior to that, I don't know what you want to call it, but it definitely wasn't a daily Scrum.
In fact, let me kind of share with you what the Scum Guide says about this.
And I read it off to them.
I let them know with the scrum guide said about it.
Well, they did feel a little tricked, but they also, I could see the light bulb go off in their heads.
Every one of them was like, ah, okay, now I get it.
Right, this seemed pointless before.
I did not really understand why we had to come in this room, because my Scrum Master wasn't doing anything with our status.
It just seemed like Scum Master was micromanaging us.
But now that I understand we're here to really talk to each other and help each with what we are going to do today, it clicked.
Maybe I was a little deceitful.
I get that, I'll take that.
But the point was driven home and that team never looked at their daily scrums again the same.
So I would propose to you Maybe if you have a group of those long time developers who have seen it all and done it, all before they know what this daily
scrum thing is, they're familiar with the three questions.
Maybe you need to help them get out of their mindset and say, Hey, let's try something new.
And sometimes just changing the name is all it takes.