Does your team dreads Scrum meetings?

Yes, you read it right. This is a common challenge faced by both small and medium sized enterprises. The reasons which could be picked up almost immediately for your team’s hesitation to the scrum meetings could range from it being a new process to the way it is conducted. Ideally, a successful scrum implementation is not that technical as it sounds. But still is seen as a challenge at many places.

What is Scrum or a stand up daily meeting?

It is a coordination meeting where all the teammates are gathered to brief their scope of work for the day to the rest of the team members. It is also a medium for the other teammates to understand the user stories ready to be picked up in the current sprint and the ones which will be picked up in the next sprint.

In this blog, I shall not cover the different roles in the scrum as I have covered it extensively in my other blog. In case you are new to scrum, you can also check out my blog focusing on definitions very commonly used in a scrum environment.

Ideal factors which ensures the scrum’ s success.

• Duration of Scrum – It should be completed ideally in a time span of 15 minutes and not more than that. As a Scrum master, feel free to correct your teammates on how to precisely share the updates during the scrum.
• Time of the Scrum – The time of the Scrum should be blocked each day and should be clearly communicated to the team. Ensure it starts at the suggested time each day and doesn’t get delayed. You will see the team will adopt it as a regular routine activity after two weeks of its implementation.
• Team Size – The Scrum discussion should happen among a maximum of 10 teammates to ensure its success. If you work in an organization where the entire company’s team strength is 30 including both technical and business team members, then you can have one scrum meeting. In this case, ensure the developers and business teams don’t end up sharing their detailed activity log rather keep their focus on user stories in their bucket.

Having shared all the relevant content good enough for you to understand the scrum, let us move on to factors that contribute to its failure.

• Resistance to Change – Change is often seen as a scary incidence. Not everyone will realize the impact of scrum meetings at once and will resist either by not participating in the scrum or by partially mentioning the user stories due with them. Make sure you ensure their participation asking them to explain details if needed so that their participation increases consciously. Senior executives with an open-minded approach can communicate and convince the team with the relevance of scrum.
• Scattered teams – Scrum is successful even when the team is scattered at various locations following distinct time zones. What can affect the scrum meetings adversely is the time zone and the skill set of teammates. Make sure the timing for scrum is agreed upon by all giving the on site members a chance to participate actively.
• Abrupt role changes – In an agile environment, changes are always taken care of but the changes in the roles of teammates might not be taken in a good spirit thereby affecting the overall work estimate of the sprint. This may lead to the sudden resignation of team member and even when the individual replaced with someone new, the pace of the work is doomed to get affected.
• Storytelling to be banned – No one in the scrum is interested in knowing in detail where you got stuck while writing the code and how you overcame it or if you seek help from a senior. It is advised to say that you will continue working on the module and will connect with other team members in case of any issues. The Scrum Master can jump in between and ask any individual to stick to the user stories and their consequent action to avoid long discussions.
• Bugs and Integration testing activities – Not all the bugs will be critical in nature and can be recorded in product backlog to taken up in next sprint but the critical ones will demand a change in current sprint. You should keep in mind all these activities are not concentrated in depth during a sprint. A simple mention of it should be good enough a reason for you to note it down then and make changes in the sprint after the scrum meeting.

Hope to have highlighted the challenges and possible solutions to tackle the same in the above blog. If you come across similar challenges or distinct ones, do leave your comments in the comment section.