Daily meeting

Introduction#

Some call this the Daily Scrum ↗, which unnecessarily imports framework branding into a practice that predates it. Others call it a stand-up, from the practice of holding it standing around a physical board, which rarely happens today.

For simplicity, this page uses daily meeting. Other reasonable options are the daily or huddle.

The daily meeting is a short session, held at the same time every day, where the whole team looks together at the work in flight and agrees what needs to happen to keep it moving.

It is the most frequent feedback loop a team has. Done well, it takes ten minutes, surfaces the items that are stuck, realigns the team on priorities, and ends with people knowing what they are doing today.

This page explains how to run it: making the work visible, walking the board from right to left, focusing on help and flow rather than status, rotating the facilitator, and keeping deep discussion out of the meeting itself.

The work must be visible#

Everything the team is working on needs to be represented on the board, in the column that reflects its true current stage, before the meeting starts. This is an essential prerequisite to running an effective daily meeting.

Every item in progress is on the board, in the right stage, with the people working on it identified.
Blocked items carry a flag or tag that says what they are waiting for.
Work that arrives outside the normal route is on there too, including production incidents and support requests.
Trivial or ad-hoc activities like answering a quick query should not usually appear on the board. If these add up to a significant amount of time each week then this should be looked at in the retrospective.
The board is updated as work happens, or at the latest before the meeting begins. Updating cards during the meeting is poor use of everyone’s time.

Why?

Invisible work cannot be managed. It’s trivial to agree on the priority order when it’s clearly visible, and easy to diverge if it’s not. Team capacity can easily be eaten by lower priority work if it’s not visible. Stuck items are far easier to spot if they’re visible.
The board is the team’s shared memory. Without it, the meeting can only cover what people happen to remember and choose to raise, which reliably favours the interesting work over the stuck work.
It depersonalises the difficult conversation. When a card has not moved for four days, the team is looking at a card, not interrogating a colleague. It turns an individual challenge into something the team can see and work together to solve.
Queues and overload become obvious. It immediately becomes clear if work is piling up at some stage or someone is split between too many items, so the team can do something about it.
It makes metrics useful. Metrics that are useful to highlight where team process can be improved, such as cycle time, lead time, and velocity, are only as good as the board they are derived from.

A useful working rule

“If it isn’t on the board, it doesn’t happen” is a good rule of thumb. Teams that agree to only work on items on the board are usually surprised by how much work was previously invisible, and by how much of their capacity it ate up.

Walk the board#

Go through the work items, not the people. Take each item in turn and ask:

What is needed to move this to the next stage? (See Definition of Done.)
Is anything in the way, or about to be?
Who is working on it, and does anyone else need to be?

The common alternative is a round of the three questions (“what did I do yesterday, what will I do today, what is in my way”), taken person by person. It feels natural, but it is much less effective in practice. It produces a series of individual justifications of busyness, addressed to the most senior person present, while everyone else waits for their turn. It also only covers work that someone volunteers to mention, which can quietly exclude exactly the items that most need attention.

Why?

Every item gets attention, including the ones nobody would have mentioned. Silent items are usually stuck items.
The conversation is about flow, not about how hard people are working. The question is what the work needs, not what a person did.
Ownership becomes shared. The item is the team’s problem, and the person holding it is not on their own with it.
It exposes the shape of the workflow. Repeatedly finding the same column full is a process problem the team can then act on.

Right to left#

Start at the right-hand end of the board, closest to done, and work back towards the backlog.

Stop starting, start finishing

“Stop starting, start finishing” is a mantra worth repeating. Nothing has any value until it is in production.

Items sitting further to the right have had more effort invested in them already and need the least work to release value, so these should be the first things the team looks at and in most cases the highest priority.

Walking left to right doesn’t put attention in the right place. Most time and energy will be spent on the work in development, with the nearly-finished work being discussed briefly in a rush at the end. The items that would have reduced work in progress are the ones that get skipped.

Working right to left also mirrors how the work should flow. Pull systems fill from the right: an item only moves forward when there is space ahead of it. Asking “what would let this move on” starting from the right shows you where the first queue is, and that is where the team’s help is worth most.

While you walk, give particular attention to:

Items that have not moved since yesterday, and especially items that have not moved for several days.
Items carrying a blocked flag, and whether the thing they are waiting for is actually being chased by someone.
Any column that is over its WIP (work in progress) limit.

Who needs help, who can help#

The purpose of the meeting is to leave with decisions made, or at least with the actions needed to reach them identified. For each item that needs attention, the useful questions are:

What is blocking this, and who is going to unstick it?
Who else could pair on this, review it, or test it today?
Is anyone about to be blocked, or about to be overloaded?
Does anyone have capacity, and if so, what is the most useful thing they could pick up?

When someone has capacity, the first choice should be helping to finish something already in flight, not pulling a new item. We aim to minimise work in progress. The warning signs to watch for are more items in progress than people, one person’s name on several items at once, and items sitting idle without being actively worked on. The prompt is always the same: what can we finish before we start anything else? Where an item has stalled part way through, it is sometimes possible to split it so the completed part can be delivered and the remainder tracked separately.

Take discussion offline#

Keep to fifteen minutes at the very most, and expect a well-functioning team to be done in less.

Anything that needs more than a couple of sentences gets parked. The facilitator names it, notes who needs to be in the conversation, and moves on. At the end of the meeting, run through the parked list and agree what happens to each: usually the two or three people involved stay on the call or grab a room straight afterwards, while everyone else gets on with their day.

This is not a way of avoiding the discussion. It is a way of having it properly, with the right people, without holding the rest of the team hostage to a debate they don’t need to be involved in. Deferring by a few minutes rather than scheduling it for later also keeps it cheap, because everyone is already together.

The daily meeting is also not the team’s only chance to talk. If people are saving up conversations for it, that is worth understanding, because it usually means something is discouraging them from raising things as they happen.

Take turns to facilitate#

Rotate the facilitator. It should not always be the team lead, the Scrum Master, or the same enthusiastic volunteer.

The facilitator’s job is small and well defined: walk the board right to left, keep the pace up, park anything that is turning into a discussion, make sure quieter people are encouraged to share what they need to, and run the parked list at the end. It is a role anyone in the team can do with a little practice.

When it is someone else’s turn, the team lead should visibly follow their lead, including on timekeeping. If the lead takes over the moment the meeting wobbles, the rotation is decorative and everyone can tell.

Why?

Resilience. Everyone becomes familiar with running the meeting, so it goes ahead unchanged when the usual facilitator is on holiday or off sick.
Engagement with the process. Taking turns running the meeting forces everyone to understand how the team’s workflow actually fits together, and people who understand it are better placed to use it well and improve it.
Everyone gets a voice, particularly the quieter members, who tend to contribute more in every meeting once they have run a few.
It builds connection. Each person gets a turn at the centre of attention, and the team rallies round its less experienced or less confident members when it is their turn.
It flattens the hierarchy. Taking hierarchy out of a routine is worth doing wherever you can, and this is one of the easiest places to do it. A meeting nobody owns is a meeting everybody owns.
Styles differ, usefully. People bring their own approach, and everyone picks up techniques from watching others facilitate.
It is more fun. It’s an easy way to make something that could be a chore into something more interesting.

Choosing the facilitator

A fun and easy way to choose the facilitator is to do it randomly, using Wheel of Names ↗ or similar.

Spin at the end of the meeting for the next day rather than at the start for the current one. Advance notice costs nothing and makes a real difference to anyone who finds facilitating daunting. It’s OK if the same name comes up twice in close succession: that’s part of the randomness, which is the point.

Timing#

The daily meeting should happen at the same time every working day, and should be in the diary as a recurring slot. Pick a time that suits the team rather than the earliest possible one: an interruption is cheapest at a natural boundary, so mid-morning or just after lunch often beats first thing, particularly for teams spread across time zones or with school runs. Fifteen minutes is the maximum. Start on time regardless of who is missing, and finish as soon as the board has been walked, rather than filling the slot.

Attendance#

The whole delivery team, including testers, designers, and the Product Owner, should be in the meeting. Anyone else is welcome to listen, but the meeting belongs to the team and is not a briefing for stakeholders. If a manager or stakeholder attends regularly, expect the tone to shift towards reporting, and be deliberate about resisting that. Someone missing a day with good reason is OK; missing consistently means someone is not really in the team, and that is worth flagging.

Key points#

Everything in flight must be on the board, in the right stage, and up to date before the meeting starts. Work that is not visible cannot be managed, helped with, or forecast.
Walk the items, not the people, to focus on moving the work rather than on how busy people are being.
Walk right to left, because finishing is worth more than starting and the meeting’s energy should go to the items closest to done.
Ask what each item needs and who can provide it. Leave with decisions made or planned.
Prefer helping to finish something over starting something new, and treat the meeting as the daily enforcement point for WIP limits.
Park anything longer than a couple of sentences and deal with it immediately afterwards, with only the people who need to be there.
Rotate the facilitator, chosen at the end of the previous day’s meeting.
Fifteen minutes is a maximum, not a target.
Hold it at the same time every day, at a natural boundary rather than the earliest possible slot.
It is the delivery team’s meeting, including the Product Owner. Others may listen, but it is not a stakeholder briefing.

Mistakes to avoid

Reporting status to the lead. If everyone speaks to one person, the meeting has become a management check-in and the team will stop bringing real problems to it.
Assigning work. The team pulls work; the daily meeting is where team members agree who should work on what, not where a lead hands work out.
Solving the problem in the meeting. Identify it, name who will handle it, move on.
Updating the board during the meeting. Come prepared, or the first five minutes are spent dragging cards.
Skipping it when the lead is away. If the meeting depends on one person, rotate the facilitator until it doesn’t.
Letting it drift longer. A meeting that regularly overruns is usually one that is solving problems in the room, or one whose board was not up to date.
Treating it as the team’s communication. It is a daily checkpoint, not a substitute for talking to each other during the day.