Stand up schedule
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One of the things I love about the scrum framework is that it’s easy to customise and adapt to your own needs and preferences. My department is made up of 3 functional teams and a couple of other functional leads. We had always had 1 daily standup that focussed on the updates from the single scrum team that operated across my department, but we also tried to incorporate each of the functional teams that weren’t otherwise directly involved in scrum activities. With 20+ team members, this quickly made for an impractical 15min daily standup – updates were either too detailed and so not understood by most attendees, or too broad/general/ambiguous and so not useful to anyone!
In 2020, the demands of our product roadmap required that we split into 2 scrum teams. This created further complexity in our standup requirements, but also offered an opportunity to overhaul our approach to standups altogether. Combined with the rapid move to distributed work practices that year (i.e. COVID-enforced WFH), I also needed a forum to regularly check in with the team and try to keep us all connected, aligned and motivated. And so, our new standup schedule was developed, implemented and still going strong 18mths later!
Note we use the same zoom link for all days and all standups, except for 1 of the functional teams that break into their own channel as needed
- Monday
- 9-9:15am. Informal chat (optional)
- 9:15-9:30am. All hands – sharing top priority activity for the week
- Tuesday
- 9-9:10am. Scrum team 1 only
- 9:10-9:20am. Scrum team 2 only
- 9:20-9:30am. Functional team check-ins
- Wednesday
- 9-9:10am. Scrum team 1 only
- 9:10-9:20am. Scrum team 2 only
- 9:20-9:30am. Functional team check-ins
- Thursday
- 9-9:10am. Scrum team 1 only
- 9:10-9:20am. Scrum team 2 only
- 9:20-9:30am. Functional team check-ins
- Friday
- 9-9:15am. Informal chat (optional)
- 9:15-9:30am. All hands – sharing top win / shout out for the week
Writing it out, it seems complex, but actually the model is pretty simple. Monday is for aligning around top priorities for the week. Friday is for celebrating the work we’ve done together.
I will generally use a few minutes Monday and Friday to share any overall comments or information for the entire team.
