Follow up to the story-driven standup

I’ve had both positive and negative responses to my article on the story-driven standup. Recently I found the following post:

http://jroller.com/page/njain?entry=faqs_on_standup

Are standups another name for status report meeting?
The daily status meeting is meant to be an opportunity for the team members to report to the team on their progress and obstacles. If the team members are reporting to the Process Facilitator (or the Product Owner, or the project manager or the executive who just happens to join the meeting) then those people might change what they report and how they feel about the meeting. It will no longer be open nor useful to the other team members.

Standup is the team‘s primary opportunity to self-organize. The outcome should be that the team has collectively agreed what to work on today, and what impediments they need their manager [Iteration manager/Scrum Master] to remove along the way.

If we think of the standup in-terms of “answering three questions“, it contributes to the difficulty of getting people away from reporting progress/status to the managers. Apparently words like “answer“ and “question” tend to be associated with ideas closer to being interrogated rather than communicating information.

Hence it is important to see the team members do not treat this as time to report progress to their boss. When answering these questions the team member should talk to the team and not to the manager.

The second to the last paragraph really highlights the reason I wrote the story-driven standup article. Answering the three questions consistently lead to status update meetings rather than a time for the team to organize its work for the day.

1 November 2006 | Agile, SCRUM | Comments