How to Do an Asynchronous Daily Stand-up (Without Disrupting Your Day)

- Daily stand-ups, I have a love hate relationship with daily stand-ups. You might know them as Daily Scrums or stand-ups or simply dailies and I've been in dailies. It helped us to be super productive laser-focused and customer driven. And I've also been in dailies that made me feel energy drained before the day had even started.

But when done right, dailies can help you to be miles ahead of your competition. So today's episode we're gonna answer the question. How can you do highly effective and result-driven dailies while working from home? Let's go. (upbeat music) The goal of the daily is to inspect the progress your team made since yesterday and to adapt your plan for today when necessary.

The best daily stand-ups I was part of were with a small team, four to five people everyone was always on time because if you were not on time then you had to buy lunch. And everyone had prepared what they wanted to discuss with the team. The preparation was to update our sprint backlog and to make sure that, there were comments or flags next to the things we wanted to talk about with the team.

Now, the worst ones, don't get me started about the worst ones. I've been in dailies that didn't take 15 minutes but an hour. I've been running from one daily to the other three or four dailies in a row. I've been in dailies where there were 20 people in a room without windows. And we were trying to connect with a Java client to a team at the other side of the world.

I've been in countless dailies that were just horrible. And maybe you recognize any of those situations but still I recommend most agile teams to work with a daily stand-up or a variation of that. In the role of agile coach, I have helped many teams, in improving their way of working and a big part of that is improving their communication style and the way they are collaborating with each other.

And also with people outside of the team. But like I said there are many common problems you might run into when doing daily stand-ups. So that's why I created another workshop format you can do today and you can help it to improve the daily stand-ups within your team. You can find the download link below or go over to workshopwednesday.

co where you can find the Google slides link the PowerPoint link or the PDF link. So let's jump into the presentation. The workshop is called doing remote daily stand-ups without disrupting your day. And the agenda looks like this. We're gonna talk about common problems and we're gonna look at the alternatives for daily Stand-ups.

Let's start with the common problems around daily stand-ups because if you identify what's not working well for your team. Then it's also easier to explore alternatives and to improve your dailies. I've made a list of common problems here. So stand-ups that take longer than 50 minutes or stand-ups where you keep repeating the same things every day but are not resolving them Stand-ups of people coming in unprepared.

And the idea here is that you identify what's not working well for your team. So we're gonna use dot-voting again everyone gets five votes and you can place the votes next to the Post-it. Which you think are an issue for your team and feel free to add your own Post-its here for your team Give your own Workspace again so you can write things down here and add them to this slide if you think there's anything missing.

Later in a workshop I'm gonna show three ways how you can do daily stand-ups without disrupting your day but it doesn't matter which one you choose. "By failing to prepare, you prepare to fail". So it's important that you discuss with your team how you want to prepare. And that's what this exercise is about.

Write down everyone for themselves first what you think should be done before the daily standup and then discuss it with each other and make a list of the things that should be in place. And that's pretty much all I can say about this step in the workshop. Preparation is everything. It's a really simple step, but it's also in our nature in our human nature to forget this step.

So help the team by coming up with a checklist. What do you wanna do in preparation before the workshop and make sure that the team also follow ups on that. And in the next step of the workshop we're gonna talk about Daily Scrums. And that's because scrum is one of the most common ways that people start working agile and also get introduced to the concept of daily stand-ups but it's not the only way to do daily stand-ups.

The scrum guide has just been updated at the end of 2020 making it less prescriptive, which is a good thing. And if we look at the Daily Scrum how it's described in the scrum guide then the purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress down with the sprint goal and adapt the sprint backlog as necessary adjusting the upcoming plan work.

In the 2020 update of the scrum guide they made this part less prescriptive. So what they did, they removed three questions that were listed here. What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? And is there anything stopping you or slowing you down from getting there? And I think this is a good thing because when applied right these questions can be super helpful but they were applied wrong a lot of times.

So because of that the daily standup during the status update meeting where you saw 20 people in a line just drilling down the answers to these questions. And that's just simply a waste of time but maybe still is confusing in the scrum guide. Is this part that the Daily Scrum is a 50 minute event. I think most of the people will translate event into meeting.

I think this has proven not to be true anymore in 2020. And this principle comes from the idea that you might think that you're all on the same page but when you actually make it concrete then you see that people have different ideas. And if you combine them that you can come up with the best possible solution for your customers.

And in the guide last year I made a side note, that video is getting huge and easier to record. And this could be a great addition to this agile principle. And actually that is what we're gonna explore in the next steps of this workshop because only not video can be a great way to do your dailies also text and audio can be great alternatives to do daily stand-ups that don't disrupt your day.

But remember that a daily standup is just the best practice In the end It's about the principles and the values that are behind the daily stand-up. If you feel that your daily stand-ups are boring or not valuable anymore then stop and inspect and adapt again. The biggest benefit of doing asynchronous dailies is that they don't disrupt your day.

For example, if one person in your team likes to start at seven and other people like to start at nine or maybe 10 even then it can become quite a challenge to find the right time to start your daily stand-up. With an asynchronous way you replace that meeting with a text, audio or video update you send to the whole team in which everyone can see.

But the challenge is on how to get started with that and to make it a routine for your team. And the easy way to do that is to make use of tools. I've listed three tools DailyBot, Yac and Loom. DailyBot is a way to do text-based daily stand-ups it integrates into your Slack environment or also in Microsoft teams and Google chat.

And it helps you to remind you every day to ask your three questions. What did you complete yesterday? What are you planning to work on today? And do you have any blockers? So in a sense DailyBot is kind of like your digital scrum master. It helps you to remind the team to fill in the answers to these questions.

And the neat thing is that you can add more things so you can track the team motivation over time. You can give each other kudos and it gives you a great overview from everything that's happening in the team. If you want to do a daily stand-ups via audio. Then Yac Y. A. C is one of the most popular tools to use right now.

And basically what it does. It gives you the opportunity to record audio messages and send them one-on-one to persons in your team or send them to a channel which your whole team is a part of. Where everyone posts their daily stand-up audio message every day. The challenging part about this though is that you have a blank canvas and that people can record audio messages as long as they want.

So if you're gonna use this tool then I would highly recommend to use a time limit of one or two minutes per person because otherwise, if you are with five or six people then you're only listening to audio and you want to make sure that people only talk about the things that are really important in their messages.

And the last one is called Loom which is a great way to record your screen on your desktop. And also see a picture of yourself in there. We go to the website then you can see that it's really easy to just talk about what you're showing on your screen. And also that it's really easy to share it with your colleagues but also here I would recommend the time limit of a minute or two minutes per person.

And also to agree on a specific place where you're gonna share these videos. You don't want this in your email box because then it gets cluttered quite easily. So a nice trick to do is to create a Google docs document where everyone can post their links every day. The next steps of the workshop are similar to the previous video that I made.

If you want to learn more about that then click the link. But basically what you're gonna do is to choose what format you wanna use and decide when you're happy with the outcome. And then also check how confident the team is with doing this experiment. If you're gonna do this workshop picture theme then please leave a comment below.

I would love to know. If you want to download this template then go over to workshopwednesday. co. You can find the Google slides the PowerPoint and the PDF format. And if you like these kinds of workshop formats then you can go over to the same website and join the Workshop Wednesday community become a member.

Every week we will release a new workshop format to help you run high energy and result-driven workshops. That's it for now. Thank you for watching and see you in the next one. Peace.