Four Reasons to Stick with Daily Scrum Meetings
A scrum meeting, or daily scrum, should last no longer than fifteen minutes and should happen every day at the same time and place during a project's duration. The daily scrum should communicate project progress, clarify product direction, and identify any issues or impediments. Then, those factors are all taken into account by the ScrumMaster and product owner, who make sure the project stays on course and any barriers to success are removed.
Although not everyone speaks at these meetings, every team member is required to attend. Pro tip: The ScrumMaster and product owner are also team members, despite their titles of leadership. If you have come to a position in your career where you feel you don’t need to attend every daily scrum, then consider these four reasons why you should stick with it.
Business value: The development team focuses on development, not taking the product to market. That means it would be possible for the development team to focus on technical issues and lose track of the business value of a project. Attending every day can help to right the ship should the project float too far to the technical side and away from producing results and creating business value.
Game plan: The daily scrum is irreplaceable as the most effective way to assign tasks and reallocate resources and skills to handle potential road blocks, diffuse team conflicts, and communicate business issues.
Moving forward: Meeting daily lessens the chance of work being done without the ScrumMaster's or product owner’s awareness. This is essential in making sure the project is almost always moving forward. This way, momentum and time aren’t sacrificed bringing someone up to speed or reworking aspects of the project due to a lack of transparency.
Keeping it organized: Being present every day keeps everyone accountable and prepared for the day. It allows for the project's focus to be better dictated. Daily scrum meetings can get technical, but this kind of talk is vital for helping the product owner understand how the project is taking shape and allowing team members to better coordinate their efforts and establish a clear vision of how the moving parts will come together as a whole.
Still don’t think these are reasons enough to attend the daily scrum meetings? Try thinking about that fifteen-minute time commitment and how much it is actually disrupting your workflow. Now weigh it against the time it would take to be brought up to speed, rework entire portions of the project, or have to completely start over so the original business value can be obtained. Fifteen minutes a day doesn’t seem so bad now, does it?
