Your Guide to Holding a Daily Standup Meeting
When using the Scrum process as part of the Agile methodology, team members take part in Daily Standup (or Daily Scrum) Meetings. Here, they discuss any issues in their current work sprint, along with ways to resolve these issues and continue their workflow.
What is a Daily Standup Meeting?
The Daily Standup Meeting is a daily meeting (some teams choose to hold this meeting once a week instead of daily) that lasts between 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the team and what needs to be discussed.
While there aren’t any exact rules for holding a Daily Standup, there are definitely a few guidelines to follow to keep your team on track.
3 tips for quick and productive Daily Standup Meetings
1. Stay Standing
Daily Standup meetings are called that for a reason — so, stand up!
If everyone settles in their chairs around a boardroom table and gets too relaxed, the meeting will likely run overtime, and team members will start getting distracted.
2. Keep the meeting to three questions
There are three questions that need to be addressed during your meeting:
What has already been done?
What needs to be done?
What challenges are we currently facing?
3. Embrace routine
Routines are great for teams working within a structured Agile methodology because sticking to the process leads to the ideal outcome for your product or project.
If meetings are held at a different time each day, it will throw off the whole team.
Use a digital tool to make your Daily Standup Meetings more effective
The point of Daily Standup Meetings is to get everyone on your team on the same page as quickly as possible. But, if people have to travel between floors, office buildings, or call-in from remote locations for the meeting, it can feel like it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Plus, using conventional meeting tools usually leads to ideas being rolled up in flipcharts or erased from whiteboards making reviewing what was discussed the day before more difficult.
There are many different digital tools out there that compile information in a digital workspace, but we think that Stormboard does the job best.
With Stormboard, you can add information from any device, no matter where you are located. This makes it an ideal tool for teams who need to physically see what is going on in their project and ensures that remote employees are active participants in the meeting.
Your meeting template can also be updated before the meeting, and during the meeting, more than one person can add to the template simultaneously, which can easily cut your meeting time in half, saving you both time and money. Once the meeting is over, all of your information is automatically saved so it is there for you to come back to the next time you meet.
Stormboard even has a built-in Daily Standup Meeting Template that you can use as-is or customize to suit your needs (pictured below).
The current template features three sections:
What have you done since yesterday?
What are you planning on doing today?
Any impediments/stumbling blocks?
Let’s take a closer look at each of the three sections and how you would use them.
1. What have you done since yesterday?
Have your team members quickly talk about the work that they have completed since the last Standup. This establishes what is done so you can determine what to do moving forward, or who the next step of the project needs to be passed on to.
2. What are you planning on doing today?
This is the plan for the current workday. It's the section where team members write down their daily goals or what they plan to complete that day. It’s important to note these tasks just in case someone’s to-do’s conflict with another team member’s list, or might slow them down.
3. Any impediments/stumbling blocks?
If there are any current or foreseeable problems that your team is facing, this is where they should be documented. This section includes any issues you may have already run into or are anticipating.
Conclusion
By using a Daily Standup Meeting to acknowledge what the team has already done, what needs to be done, and any possible roadblocks, you will be prepared to tackle the workday ahead with everyone on the same page working towards the same goals.
Get Started
Try the Daily Standup Meeting Template to improve your everyday meetings. Sign up for Stormboard now.
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