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You can accomplish a lot in 15 minutes with an agile approach to project management.
Scrum methodology, which was popularized in the software industry, emphasizes completing small bits of work and daily check-ins with colleagues.
“It’s a way to coordinate the efforts of a team by holding brief meetings during which members plan their work, identify top priorities and acknowledge challenges,” said Angela Druckman, President of the Druckman Company and a certified scrum trainer.
Scrum organizes work into sprints, which typically last between one and four weeks. During a sprint, coworkers provide feedback on the progress made toward the completion of assigned tasks during daily scrums.
In the software industry, these daily check-ins help to ensure product development teams don’t build “shelfware” products, which ultimately do not meet the needs of the intended users. This concept applies to any product or service, including the design and development of orthopedic devices.
Effective Use of the Time
Let’s look at how to get the most out of the daily huddles that help teams focus on reaching the finish lines of assigned projects.
Assign a facilitator. The scrum master, who leads the team through a project, should remind its members that the daily meetings are designed to identify problems and not necessarily solve them. The scrum master can address minor issues during daily scrums, but should suggest taking conversations about larger issues offline to respect everyone’s time and ensure that those not directly involved can focus on their work.
This also ensures the team sticks to the 15-minute time limit. “Scrums that last longer than that turn into meetings to solutionize and should be scheduled for another time,” Druckman said.
The scrum master should guide the dialogue to keep the team focused on discussing outcomes and prevent one person from dominating the conversation.
Daily scrums should be a brief, meaningful conversation among the team with the scrum master mostly listening, suggested Druckman. “This will get the maximum benefit with the least time investment,” she said.
Ask key questions. Daily scrums revolve around asking team members three questions: What did everybody accomplish yesterday? What is everybody doing today? Does anybody need anything that they don’t have?
These questions create daily transparency on how the product development team is progressing on the sprint. The information sharing also ensures that every team member receives the same message on a daily basis.
Encourage team involvement. As the team matures and becomes used to participating in daily scrums, the scrum master can step back and let the members take on more responsibility. This is accomplished by asking a single question at the start of the meeting: Who wants to start? A team member will initiate the conversation by letting their colleagues know what they’ve accomplished, what they have planned for the day and the help they need to accomplish their goals.
“Teams will eventually take over daily scrums, relying less on the scrum master to guide the conversations and making the process their own,” Druckman said.
Focus on updates. Team members should be discouraged from reporting the status of their portion of the project to the scrum master, as this can lead to resentment. Viewing the scrum master as the project manager defeats the entire purpose of the daily gatherings. A healthy scrum occurs when the team talks to each other, with most of the talking done by its members.
“Constantly deferring to one team member as the leader of the group can lead to a loss of team self-management, which is an important facet of scrum methodology,” Druckman said. “The team should oversee managing their own work, with the scrum master stepping in to help only when necessary. It’s important to watch for team members asking to be told what to do, as this is a dysfunction that should be avoided.”
Although daily scrums aren’t viewed as status reports, they do create an underlying level of accountability for team members who share what they accomplished and what they plan to get done that day. Teams that complain about having to meet daily likely believe scrums are status reports or don’t like the transparency the process brings to the project the team is working on, according to Druckman.
It’s better for teams to over-communicate and share issues as soon as they become aware of them, so that the project manager can take action to avoid a last-minute disaster.
“The purpose of scrum is to achieve transparency in project management, which is something that is highly valued but can be difficult to achieve,” Druckman said. “Project managers understand that everything won’t go perfectly all the time, but they don’t want to hear about problems at the last minute when it’s too late to fix them.”
More Important Than Ever
Daily touchpoints are crucial for successful teamwork and the scrum approach to project management has become increasingly important, particularly during the pandemic when remote work has the potential to fragment team members.
“My opinion on remote work has changed,” she said. “If you had asked me before the pandemic if this concept would work remotely, I wouldn’t have thought so. But I’ve seen in-person teams struggle with effective communication while groups with members in San Francisco, New York City and England run flawless virtual scrum meetings.”
Daily scrums can benefit professionals in all industries by providing quick touchpoints for teams to share progress, identify issues and ask for needed help. They can also benefit the bottom line.
Druckman has consulted with top-performing scrum teams at Intel, the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor computer chips.
“One of the company’s managers researched the impact daily scrums had on the business and discovered the process identified errors early in the chip manufacturing process,” she said. “The errors were much cheaper to fix, which saved the corporation significant time and money — a win/win for the team and the business.”
