How Did Covid Affect Your Daily Scrum Meeting?

Due to Covid 19, our traditional way of doing daily scrum meeting is changed a lot. We have to do our daily scrum meetings online now. Scrum meeting which was referred to as Daily Standup meeting is now referred to as Daily Sync-ups.

Purpose Of Daily Scrum Meeting

The main purpose of daily scrum meetings is to validate if everything is on track by getting input from all of the team members daily. You can check here how scrum meeting helps to achieve more productivity and what is the impact of daily scrum meeting on scrum methodologies.

Due to covid-19, Switching our daily standup meetings to online has also changed the way we used to conduct our scrum meetings. The main purpose of the daily scrum remained the same but the way is changed a little.

Today, I will share how I have experienced scrum meetings with 3 different teams and environments. So, let’s start.

Disclaimer: Just to give you a bit understanding of my domain. So, my experience is completely on quick commerce, where you get your order delivered in a few minutes. As I am sharing my own experience, so my examples will be related to quick commerce (or eCommerce) as well.

Option 1: Who Will Share The Updates?

A Product based organization where we divided the teams based on technical domains. For example; the android team, the iOS team, and the portal/dashboard team.

Team size: Large, around 13

The tool used for Task Tracking: Microsoft Azure DevOps

Team Domain: Each team covers the whole product with all the domains. For example; inventory management, payments, delivery, etc.

What do we do?

Every team member will share his status. Like what he did yesterday, what he will be doing today, and if there is any impediment.

Pros:

• You get a good knowledge from all of the perspective of the product.
• You get clear understanding of how the domain actually works. For example: your team members will involve in discussions related to the delivery of the products, inventory management, payments and so on. So being involved in daily meetings, you will get understanding about where the whole product is going.

Cons:

• If there is a task, where we require working on all of the domains, android, iOS, portal. Then we create three different tasks under 3 different teams. And if there is any ambiguity or confusion, they will have to arrange a separate meeting. This thing cannot be resolved in the daily sync-up as not all the required resources are available there.
• Normally, the time duration for daily sync up is 15 mins, but due to team size. It usually takes more than 30 or 45 minutes. Team members normally share every single detail of their work on which they are working even if they are helping someone else. It’s more kind of logging your activity.

Option 2: What’s The Status Of The Task?

A Product based organization where we divided the teams based on operational domains. For example; Warehouse Team, Delivery Team, and Products Team. Just to make it clear, these teams are the tech teams who are working on different verticals of the product. Each team has its own mobile developers, frontend developers, backend developers, and QA.

Team size: Medium, around 10

The tool used for Task Tracking: Jira

Domain: Each team covers only the specified vertical of the product.

What do we do?

In this team, our approach is quite different from the above one. We open the board and discuss the status of each task on that board. By doing this, the flow of the meeting is fully focused on the tasks at hand. And if there is any dependency, it can be resolved straight away.

Pros:

• The meeting is well focused. You don’t get distracted by any other tasks.
• All of the required resources for the tasks are already in the team. So any dependencies or blockers can be removed immediately to maintain the flow of the team.

Cons:

• You don’t know the other verticals of the product. For example, if you are in warehouse management team, then you don’t know how payments and deliveries veriticals are working. Although to get the knowledge of other domains, we switch teams after 3–4 months.

Option 3: How Can We Help?

We recently had to launch a new product with a very tight schedule of 2 months. Although the tasks were quite repetitive for us. But it was still a tough job. For this product, we formed a team with all the required resources.

Team size: Small, around 6

Tools Used for Task Tracking: Microsoft Excel

Team Domain: Team for 2 months project, where our requirements were pretty straightforward.

What do we do?

Throughout our daily meetings, we just asked 1 single question. Is there anything, that is resisting us to meet our deadline? If yes, how the team can help each other? How we can resolve the blockers to achieve the milestones in the smoothest way possible? This approach helped us a lot to even finish all the requirements with 1 week of margin. We had sprints of about 1 week where we actually analyzed our performances and made decisions based on the progress.

Pros:

• This approach is very effective for us to boost the overall team performance.
• Team engages completely throughout the project. Or I would say everyone acts as a leader by taking complete responsibilities of their own domain.

Cons:

• We were completely relying on each team member. It can some time back fire for long projects or may be because of wrong team selection. As we didn’t track the progress of individuals. In fact, we tracked the progress as a team.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned ways of doing scrum meetings are my own observations and experiences. I liked the last approach very much: “How can I/We help?”. It sounds more like a culture of an organization.

If your team has adopted any other approach please do let me know in the comments below 😊