Do you need a daily scrum if your team isn’t using scrum? No, but…
If we aren’t doing a daily scrum, what should we do instead? How often should the team be synchronizing? What should we be discussing?
If you’d rather watch a video than read, check out my youtube video on the topic:
The Benefits of a Daily Scrum
The daily scrum gets its name because you meet every day to synchronize with the team. During this time you plan, discuss next steps, and ask yourselves are we on track? Do we have problems? What are the risks?
This synchronization is not something only done in scrum, however. Many agile frameworks do this. So, is this daily synchronization necessary? Not necessarily. But there is a famous saying that projects get delayed one day at a time. When you have target dates, you can be late but you don’t suddenly become late. It’s a series of small missteps that contribute to being late.
If not a Daily Scrum, then What?
So, how do you determine what the best approach is for your team? First, consider why you are synchronizing. You are synchronizing to make sure your team is on track. On track about what? This can vary depending on your team. Because of the unique nature of teams, the work you do, projects, etc., the timing that’s right for your team will vary.
Here are a few examples:
Synchronize more than once a day
Maybe you work for a huge financial institution that uses their own version of Agile. In this instance, your team is distributed all across the world and working in different time zones. You might synchronize like this: At the change of every shift in each location, the people who are leaving would get on the phone together to discuss what happened. Because this is a software development team where constant connection is important, meeting up several times a day is necessary.
Synchronize when you need it
For example, in my company, I have a very small team that does not work in software development. Some members of the team I will meet with regularly once a week and then synchronize periodically whenever it is needed throughout the week. When I’m gearing up for an event though, or are in the midst of a campaign, I may have parts of my team that I will meet with every day to discuss the numbers, results, etc. Maybe I’ll even meet with them twice a day depending on the event or campaign.
So, the needs of your team, the type of work you do, the dynamics of your business, and the specific moment of your products/campaigns all influence if you need to meet daily, more than once a day, once a week, etc. and that is perfectly fine.
The whole point of synchronizing is just to make sure we always catch that we are off-track early enough so that we don’t become too behind with any one thing or have a block for too long. Other than that, you are free to decide how and when your team synchronizes. It doesn’t make you more or less agile how often you do it.
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