The previous post (some problems with the daily Scrum meeting) outlines some of the problems faced in the daily Scrum meeting, and some of the reasons because of which the meetings could go haywire, or become ineffective. Here are some more reasons that could cause problems in the Daily Scrum meeting:
- Getting people to attend meetings on time can be pretty problematic. When there are meetings that are running back to back, people can get late in attending the meeting, and for a 15 minute meeting, even a 5-10 minute delay can cause significant problems. Even otherwise, making people be so punctual as to attend the meetings on time takes effort, and may involve some small penalties that force people to be there on time. If this continues, the ScrumMaster is the one who is supposed to take this up and get the team involved in solving the problem. Related to this, all the team members should attend, and exceptions should be allowed only in emergencies.
- Handling the impediments raised in the Scrum process. There are 2 specific problems that can happen in this process. Depending on the culture of the society where the Scrum team is working (especially in Eastern societies), it can be far more difficult for individuals to raise their concerns (for many people, raising issues is not expected, because either they are diffident, or it is expected that they should be able to solve their issues in their own way), and when these impediments are not raised and not solved, they can cause an essential breakdown of the rationale for the Daily Scrum meeting. In the second reason, the ScrumMaster is not effective enough to resolve the impediments that are raised; this cause a loss of confidence in the Daily Scrum meeting as a way to resolve impediments.
- Exhaustion. On a daily basis, doing a meeting where you come in, talk about your work and problems, all these when done over a matter of many weeks (for projects where you spend many months) can cause people to become exhausted and stop attending these meetings or being effective in them.
- Make sure that the process is more team centered than ScrumMaster centered. I stated this in previous posts, but will repeat them. If it looks like somebody is addressing the ScrumMaster (or other senior managers who may be present), this can quickly form a trend that others repeat, and make this a point that others will repeat. You need to quickly break this and emphasize that sharing needs to be happen with the team, otherwise the others will start to tune out of the meeting.
- Scrum needs to be implemented with effective coaching, and this includes making sure that people know what the purpose of the Daily Scrum is, what needs to happen, and so on. Quite often, the coaching consists of somebody coming, making a quick presentation, and the team is ready to start the Daily Scrum. This can cause people to not be sure about what their role and responsibility is, and when they do either less or more, it starts impacting the Daily Scrum meeting.
More points about more problems that can cause failure of Scrum in the next post.
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