Daily Scrums are always a fun activity especially for us scrum masters trying to help the teams to hold crisp and effective scrum calls. Throw in everyone calling in for the Daily Scrum and all organization goes to pot. With the snow and bad weather that occurs in North America more and more team members have to call in for daily scrums. I just wanted to jot down some items for scrum masters and teams to think about to help facilitate scrum calls.
- Start the conference call on-time, if possible, but don’t wait longer than a minute or two max.
- Give up and trying to figure out who is on the call. It will take forever for everyone to say who is on the online. Get away from this process of saying “Greg is online” “Sarah is online”. My advice is to let the team know they don’t have to announce who is online.
- Assume all the team members are professionals and they understand the importance of the daily scrum. Start calling the team names once you start the daily scrum. This gets everyone out of the “Greg is online” thing, plus if you are like me with some large teams it is too difficult to know who is online, with all the beeps.
- As your scrum team completes their feedback, you can always ask at the end if any one joined late. Hopefully, it is just a few people or you can go back over the people that did not voice their answers to the 3 questions. This is probably the best tactic to complete the scrum call in a timely manner.
- A tech tip is to show your scrum team how to program their mobile phones how to auto-dial into the scrum calls with the necessary #’s, pauses and *’s to make it through the logging in process. This way there is no reason why people can’t call in if they are stuck in traffic or working remotely. I always do this within the first week or two of starting with a new team.
- Another item that is not quite as effective as a live scrum, is to create a remote scrum channel in your communication tools like skype, slack, messenger, etc… This way is someone has a doctor appointment or kid issue to address, they can at least report out what they have done, will be working or have issues with. Being at a planned appointment is not an excuse not to share with the scrum team.
This video from Tripp and Tyler with the conference call is so funny
