In corona lockdown time, how to substitute daily scrum/stand-up meetings?

Question

We adopted scrum in the past as the project management paradigm. However one of the cornerstones of scrum is the daily stand-up meeting.

In corona lockdown era (or any time where it is relevant) this is no longer possible face to face. So the first adaptation was to use any of the plethora of online meetup tools. While this is amazing on paper, in practice this didn't work at all.

Some people have a bad connection (one employee works quite far and his connection quite often dropped). Some people (like me) have a lot of environmental noise: I have a neighbour that's constantly shouting. While headphones easily remove that sound the microphone every so often picks up his voice and actually thinks mine is the "noise" and removes it. And the biggest problem is the people with small children. Not only do they interrupt fairly often (admittedly cute, but adds up in time), but it means those people can no longer be sure they are "available at time x". They can only work when the children are asleep so their schedule is quite random.

This has all meant that daily stand-up meetings are near impossible, and even a meeting every few days is more of a chore and annoyance than actually serving its purpose. It's also almost impossible to fight this, as each time we solve a "problem", the next problem rises which reduces the meeting quality again.

Which made me think:

Is there a project management paradigm that accepts the fate of the world? And fully embraces the idea that "meetings are particularly valuable and can only happen every so often", thus focuses on meetings only every other week, and enables other tools to work together? While stressing the ability for each team member to work for longer periods on their own.

We're now falling back on "ad hoc" planning and just doing whatever we can without a clear structure. It would be nice if there was some structure we can put around the chaos that starts to form.

EDIT: a year later and while we tried all patchwork it still seems no end in sight for corona, and it's hurting our company a lot that companies abroad can just go to the client while we cannot... We really need an efficient way to communicate now that people have literary moved across the globe to work due to "no way to know I can visit family otherwise anytime".

Our tests using just documentation have let to a surplus of bugs that no one feels like fixing, and code quality (especially that - our time to a first working product has stayed near the same) has dropped dramatically.

Other people must have had similar problems after 2 years of no time to work together in person?

Answer 1

The problem is with the work from home situation created by COVID, not with the Scrum meetings. You should not focus on removing the meetings, but on finding ways to improve the work from home situation for those affected.

Other answers already mention ways to address your concerns and how to approach this, so I won't add any more details on that. What I do want to mention though, is that the Scrum meetings have a purpose:

• the daily allows the development team to coordinate and plan their work for the next 24 hours;
• during sprint planning the team plans their work for the next sprint;
• refinement allows the product owner to add details to what needs to be built next;
• the review allows the team to collect valuable feedback about the product;
• the retrospective allows the team to identify issues with their process and improve on it;

Can you replace all these meetings with email, chat, documents, tools and what not? Sure you can. There are lots of open source projects that function like this, with people that rarely see each other face to face, or hear each other in a conf-call, they might work on different continents, on different time zones, etc. However, this setup introduces delays. Things take more time, so care must be taken when synchronizing work and planning things out.

If you give up on meetings and do them rarely, you will introduce delays. You will miss many opportunities to synchronize work and plan things out. You also introduce risk of building the wrong product because problems are spotted later, feedback is received later, and you can move longer in the wrong direction before realizing that you needed to take corrective action.

Like I said, try to focus on ways to improve the way you all work, not on finding ways to go around the Scrum meetings. Find ways to keep the synchronization points and planning opportunities with or without face time in a meeting, with all the people or just with some of them.

You might not be able to fix everyone's issues, but it's better to have some people affected by missing some events, than for the entire team to miss them. Besides, if some of your team members have such an unfortunate work from home situation that they can't attend a short daily meeting, that situation can also prevent them from attending a larger meeting held more rarely. It's also easier to recover from some small missed checkpoint meeting held each day (less damage and information loss also), than from a larger checkpoint meeting held once per week for example.

Answer 2

The advantages of Daily Scrum are undisputable. To me these are all issues that can be fixed after discussing together during Sprint Retrospectives and you'd then be able to enjoy a nice and productive Daily Scrum.

Sprint Retrospectives are helpful because they're the last thing to do in a Sprint and they're meant to help the team reflect on how is everything going as well as to find ways to improve it. This includes the issues you're raising.

Addressing all the single concerns you bring

• Having kids is no excuse to not being able to compromise in a particular given time each day. It's one's job and what one is paid for. Best I can think of that could be done here is to all discuss a time that'd fit in particular for that person with kids and adjust. If the meeting is going on, close the door or so. It's not like this is a long meeting anyways.
• Having poor internet connection... this can mean multiple things - the person doesn't know how to select a good provider, there's no good providers, the person can't afford, the person isn't connected through cable but WiFi, ... These are all issues that can be addressed too. If it means in the end extra monthly costs for the person, I'm sure even for that a solution could be found.
• Ocasional shouts are understandable for the team. If that still disturbs you then speaking with the neighbor that you've got a meeting always at a specific time and ask for comprehension from neighbor's side can be helpful too.

When we really want something, we find a way for it.

In the end I always suggest to bring these questions up during the restrospective gatherings. It's not guaranteed that all problems would be addressed right away but the team can decide together the priority of these issues and address them together. You'd be surprised by how many of these problems get fixed and by seeing how the team is able to find the best solutions together. It's great for bonding too.

Answer 3

I'd like to share my thoughts on your question in the heading of your post. How to substitute daily scrum.

The purpose of the daily scrum is (and this you probably already know) that the team members share information with each others. So in a normal situation we would meet and share this. But times are definitely not normal, so You should ask yourself and the team "how can we share this information successfully now?". You mention having difficulties using audio due to a noisy neighbor, well could you use some kind of online-chat in the team for sharing this information?

As of the question about any particular methodology that are good on "handling the fate of the world" I'd say that all methodologies have some kind of setup on how to handle any kind of difficulties/challenges. To me it is all about being pragmatic and use whatever method that suits you and your team.

Good luck handlings the lockdown going forward. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and hopefully it's not a train...

Have a nice day.

Harry (@homeoffice since march...)

Answer 4

There's absolutely nothing wrong with using online tools, such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or similar to hold virtual face-to-face Daily Scrums. If you are prevented from using audio/video tools, you can always use tools like Slack, Discord, Google Hangouts, or Microsoft Teams.

The particular issues that you are facing seem to be related to the current forced work-from-home situation. In my experience, companies that allow remote work also require the individual to have an appropriate workspace set up. Having a poor Internet connection that precludes the use of video and audio chatting tools, loud neighbors, or interrupting children on a regular basis would also prevent working from home. Ideally, most companies would understand that these things do happen sometimes and this may be beyond the control of the remote worker, but that the remote worker would mitigate as much as possible. However, today, far more people are working remotely, including some who do not have an appropriate environment and would otherwise be in the office.

Fortunately, it looks like the current situation is approaching the end and, in the not-too-distant future, the people who want to return to the office may be able to.

The only issue that I can see that is worth addressing, from project management or an organizational policy perspective, is the scheduling. I'm not sure what has changed that prevents people from working their scheduled hours, but people should be expected to work with their teams. That includes being available for meetings and events, in whatever form they occur in.

Adjusting your project management processes for a temporary circumstance is not the right solution here. Having a daily synchronization meeting adds a lot of value in reducing risk and being able to adapt the plan to a changing circumstance. Assuming that you are having success with this event in general, I wouldn't change the fact that it happens, but rather how it happens. Instead of voice chats, consider a period where everyone participates in a chat session using Teams, Hangouts, Slack, or whatever messaging platform your organization uses. It's not quite as high-fidelity as a video chat, but addresses concerns about poor Internet connections, noisy neighbors or children, sharing the space with roommates or significant others also working from home, and more.

If you do make more significant process changes, I'd recommend that you do so in order to improve your way of working, and not to work around temporary issues. Other events may have similar opportunities for changing the specifics of how the meeting or event is held, rather than reducing the occurrence of the event or removing the meeting entirely.

Answer 5

TL;DR

Your problem is neither the Scrum framework nor the Daily Scrum event. It's a lack of adaptability and a lack of commitment to underlying principles such as collaboration and a predictable cadence. Those are the issues you need to resolve.

Analysis and Recommendations

Let's go back to first principles. The purpose of the Daily Scrum (which is not optional within the Scrum framework), is a coordination meeting for the Developers. It provides them a short window to collaborate on dependencies, and to set up follow-up meetings or other activities post-Scrum to handle any impediments. The relevant portion of the Daily Scrum's core purpose is defined as follows:

[The] Daily Scrum focuses on progress toward the Sprint Goal and produces an actionable plan for the next day of work.

So, first of all, the Daily Scrum shouldn't take more than 15 minutes maximum. It can also be even shorter. The 2020 Scrum Guide removed most of the prescriptive elements such as the "three questions," and "walking the board" and status pulls have always been Scrum anti-patterns. As a result, the only requirement is to have a Daily Scrum, and the best-practices format is to limit the meeting to discussing the availability or prerequisites for the upcoming day's work. This rarely takes more than 5-10 minutes for a mature Scrum Team.

Secondly, while the principles outlined in the Agile Manifesto acknowledge that face-to-face interactions provide higher bandwidth communications, that is neither a hard requirement nor a mandated Scrum practice. You can hold your meetings by phone, VoIP, Slack, semaphore flags, or any other medium you like provided it accomplishes the purpose laid out above.

Thirdly, while real life does occasionally intrude, I have to say that if you have a team that can't commit to a daily fifteen-minute time box with a minimum of interruptions on a consistent and predictable cadence, you have a more fundamental process problem. Scrum, and agile frameworks in general, operate on cadence. This provides predictability. The people on the team need to commit to the Daily Scrum, and the advent of the unexpected isn't any different when working remotely than in person insofar as people get run over by buses, struck by lightning, or trees falling on their roof even when people aren't working from home.

You could certainly switch to a framework that values individual tasking over teamwork, but that's unlikely to solve the underlying process problem here. Regardless of framework, if you have a team that can't adapt or commit, or can't provide a dependable cadence, then you simply can't deliver within a predictable schedule.

As an illustrative example, even in the middle of COVID-19 related lockdowns in the UK, sound studios like Big Finish had people working from home in makeshift recording areas like attics and closets soundproofed with comforters, pillows, and so on for hours at a time. They discuss this often in bonus soundtrack material available on releases made during this period. Was it ideal for the cast and crew? Was it comfortable for them? Was it the same as working in person within a professionally-soundproofed studio outfitted with premium equipment and commercial HVAC? Of course not! But they adapted within the limitations they had, committed collectively to collaborating on a product, and consistently delivered (albeit I suspect at a modestly reduced velocity).

Your team basically needs to do the same thing, regardless of your framework. Reducing meeting frequency will not fix the problems you're facing. You need to collaborate with the team to find solutions to the lack of collaboration, commitment, and routine communications that you're facing. You can and should do that with respect for the people involved and the challenges they're facing, but you still need to ultimately find a solution that delivers product increments on a predictable cadence.