Daily SCRUM in a consulting project
Hi everyone,
This is my first topic and I'm kind of a scrum rookie, so please show mercy if you have already answered that question a dozen times.
I'm working as an engineer in a consulting company and right now I'm trying to bring Scrum into our project work. So far it worked very well. But now I'm facing a problem I don't know how to solve. Due to our job some of our project members spend a lot of time at our clients and others work in our office. So for us it is almost impossible to have a daily Scrum with the whole project team. The first idea was to skip the daily scrum. But in my opinion the daily scrum is one of the most important tools.
Therefore i would be happy to get some suggestions and ideas from people who also had that kind of problems and maybe found a got solution.
Thank you for your help!
Oliver
P.S. Please excuse my English. I'm not a native speaker :)
What is your organizational structure? Is work still project-driven? Is there a Scrum Team?
You are right about the Daily Stand-ups. They are absolutely critical - skipping daily stand-up meetings inevitably leads to bad scrum.
Investigate ways in which the team (if it is a team) can interact virtually. There are plenty of tools out there that can simulate everyone being in one location/room. Facetime or Skype just to name a couple.
Establishing a regular, recurring point of time each day for the team to come together to discuss sprint progress is again, critical, and helps promote the cadence and rhythm that leads to higher performance.
The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to refocus the team's joint collaborative effort on achieving the Sprint Goal, and to replan work accordingly.
Do the team currently have a shared view of the goal and the work that needs to be done? Do they collaborate on that work with a sense of joint enterprise...or do they work independently of each other?
If there is no way of doing one stand-up meeting for the whole team, both in-house and at customer site. I recommend, as a work around, to have two daily stand up meetings.
The first one will be a face to face stand-up with all in-house team members. Scrum Master and every one are encouraged to take notes of all important points especially those points of interest to the absent remote team members.
The second stand-up will be for Scrum Master and remote team members using a tool such as Skype. All in-house team members are encouraged to attend if they feel it will add value.
By this way, co-located team will get full value of being together and remote members will still catch some value, as much as possible.
Ahmed,
I would strongly disagree with your work-around proposal, as it sidesteps the issue.
The daily stand-up must be used as a touch-point for the entire team, to come together around the sprint work and the sprint goal. Why would you propose a model where team members have the option of attending a daily stand-up if they feel it has value? Why would you outline an approach where co-located team members gain full value around the sprint discussion, but remote team members "may" catch some value with a follow-up touch-point?
Your suggestion introduces a significant amount of waste and inefficiency (hand-offs, meeting notes, multiple meetings) into a ceremony(daily stand-ups) designed to reduce and/or eliminate such waste.
If the team is formed with both co-located and remote members, then that is the team. There cannot be a two-tiered view of a team. Attempts to promote division between the team based on geographical location (like having two stand-ups) over-complicates communication and harms team formation.