5 Best Practices for Running a Daily Standup Meeting

If your Agile team uses the Scrum methodology, you are probably already practicing Daily Standup meetings (or Daily Scrum meetings). These meetings are an essential part of Scrum that should be done to keep the process on track.

What is a Daily Standup Meeting?

The Daily Standup Meeting is a daily or weekly meeting that lasts between 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the team and what needs to be discussed. The short time frame is to keep everyone focused on the immediate goals of the project they are working on.

“The communication in the daily scrum meeting helps the team understand how they’ll work together to accomplish the goals.” (source)

While there aren’t any exact rules for a Daily standup, because each team is different, there are best practices that come along with this type of meeting.

5 Best Practices for Effective Daily Standups

1) Don’t get comfortable

Daily Standup meetings are called that for a reason — so, stand up! If everyone sits and becomes too relaxed, the meeting may run overtime, and team members might start getting distracted.

2) Focus on three main topics

There are ideally three main points of discussion that a team should at least touch on during the meetings, which are:

  • What has already been done?

  • What needs to be done?

  • What challenges are we currently facing?

In addition, your team can also talk about what will need to be done later down the line, but it’s not necessary. If the focus isn’t on the three main topics, then the meeting can easily go south and runs the risk of being too long. Also, try not to focus on other tasks while the meeting is going on. It should be the only priority while it is happening and should be kept as short as possible.

3) Keep remote team members in the loop

Even though Standups are short meetings, team members working remotely can still bring valuable input even though they aren’t in the same room. It can be time-consuming to set up a voice or video call, so using a digital workspace to involve remote workers is the best option for this type of meeting.

For example, Stormboard allows remote employees to contribute to a meeting and see what is going on in real-time so everyone can be included!

4) Get in a routine

If you hold your Daily Standup meetings every day, try not to skip a day (unless there is an emergency or issue). Missing a meeting may throw your team out of the routine and derail the Scrum process, which may end up hurting the project being worked on.

Routines are great for teams who are 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 or week, it will throw off the whole team.

5) Try to incorporate a meeting software tool

If you are using conventional meeting practices, the results from your Standup might not be remembered or get lost before they can be acted on. Instead, try a meeting software tool. There are many different options out there to compile information on a digital whiteboard (our favorite is Stormboard).

Meeting software is great for teams who need to physically see what is going on and can help involve remote employees so that they aren’t missing out on anything.

Whether you are using a Kanban Board or another type of board for your meeting, make sure it’s updated before the meeting begins so time isn’t wasted. Plan out the topics of discussion and add any visuals that might be needed such as videos, images, or notes to get your team prepped before the meeting even begins.

How can Stormboard help?

Stormboard is the meeting hero. Our software provides users with templates that can be applied to a Storm (your digital workspace) and shared with anyone in a team. From there, team members who are in the same Storm can add ideas on virtual sticky notes, edit at the same time, move things around, add Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents, and even chat with each other. All of this is done in real-time and is saved to the cloud, so there is no worrying whether work will get saved or not.

When used for meetings, Stormboard makes it easy to involve both in-office and remote team members. Everyone can be working on the same Storm from anywhere at any time, so even if the meeting is short, no time is wasted physically writing down ideas and trying to set up a call or video chat with remote coworkers.

Because everything is saved where you left off, holding a meeting day after day is easy — there will be no need to rewrite what was covered yesterday because it will already be there ready to go.

To make your Daily Standup meetings easier to execute, Stormboard has a pre-made Daily Standup template! To access the template, create a new storm and follow the prompts. When you are in the template gallery, type into the search bar ‘Daily Standup’. The template will appear and you will be able to select it. An example of this template is shown below.

 
 

Incorporating these best practices into your Daily (or weekly) Standup meetings will get your Scrum team the positive results they are working towards.

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