Agile Stand-up Meetings

One of the salient features of agile and probably the most effective is the "Daily Stand up Meetings". Teams start their day from the daily stand ups and craft their day around the stand up. Stand up meeting enforces:
- Tranparency within the team
- Ownership of work
- Collaboration
- Risk Mitigation earlier in the cycle
- Effective communication

In my consulting experience, i have often seen people being confused about what to talk in a stand up. Taking a que from that, here is my answer:

How to conduct a standup? 

• Stand up must be practiced beside your story wall EVERY DAY
• This helps in keeping your story wall updated every day
• Stand ups are more effective if they are conducted early in the morning as a first thing before starting your work

Who should be the audience? 

• Your team
• Your PMO (they must have an equal say in the stand up just like any team member)
• Your Client (If your client is in the same location as your team then include him in the stand up)

Most people argue that having the client in the stand up may influence the teams work. But I dont agree to this, I feel the derailing can happen only if you DONT know how to conduct a stand up. Remember the stand up is just a status update from every team member, if your stand up leads into a discussion then that is definetly going to derail you and the whole purpose of having a stand up is lost in thin air.

What do you need to talk in a stand up?

• What did I do yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• Do I need any help? (Solving dependencies)

Kick Start:

• Consider a stand up token (like a pen)
• Ask any of your team member to pick up the pen
• Who ever picks it will start the stand up update first
• You then pass the pen to the next team member in a clock wise direction
• Thereby next team members gives his stand up update
• You repeat until the entire team has given an update

During the stand up make sure you update your story wall as well. 

Example: if a dev pair has completed a story then move the story on the story wall to the respective swim lane.

Key Things to Note:

• Time box your stand up (Overall stand up time must be 10 mins)
• Each team member must get a minute or two to speak
• If you find that the team is discussing rather than updating then any of the team memeber can call a "time out" asking the people discussing to take the discussion offline
• Be specific about what you update and call out dependencies or issues STRONGLY
• Dont look at your manager and give an update, remember that its the entire team that you are addressing

Agile Innovation Games - Speed boat

One of the most important facet that the agile world exposes is seeking feedback. Deriving feedback as a team for the team is the most essential element that makes the team.

Speed boat excercise is a fun way of doing a retrospective, it engages participants and also delivers value. The use of speed boat in retrospective is explained below, hope this helps :)

As an example, consider your (Speed boat) to be your iteration

Successful Iteration is the one that has completed its projected velocity (The Island)

On the post-its given to you, write down what did not go well with respect to your iteration (The Anchors)

On the post-it’s given to you, write down what could be made better in the iteration so that the iteration would have completed the projected velocity (The Engine)

Time limit is 5 minutes

Once we have the feedback, collate it remove redundancy and create themes

Then pick up each theme and prioritize it by giving it an estimate (estimate of pain – 1 being low to 3 being extreme)

Pick up the extremely painful anchors and plan to mitigate the risks around them

These painful anchors are the ones that need to be removed in order to ensure the speed boat sails swiftly and reaches the island safely

What did we learn from this?

Surface hopes and concerns

Motivate people to think

Agree as a team

Plan to mitigate hurdles (Anchors)

Where can we use this exercise?

As an exercise for discovering the depth of process adoption

In a “retrospective meeting” to discover what went right or wrong