The value of a Daily Scrum
The topic of “front-line management” seems to be coming up a lot in conversations. This started me thinking about great techniques I’ve seen leaders deploy for managing from the front.
The value of a Daily Scrum
The topic of “front-line management” seems to be coming up a lot in conversations. This started me thinking about great techniques I’ve seen leaders deploy for managing from the front.
Many people are familiar with agile development approaches, including Scrum. I’ve been able to leverage one technique, the “daily scrum,” on development projects as well as projects that have little to do with technology.
Here is our abbreviated approach. Our daily scrum was a 15-minute meeting held every day at 9am. We pulled in the leads for each of the work streams. They covered the following topics
- What they (or their teams) did yesterday
- What they planned to do today
- What barriers they were encountering
We took no time to resolve issues in the meeting. If any issues came up, we logged them and resolved them after the daily scrum meeting.
As the leader for the project, I took the list of barriers as my punch-list for the day. I understood that part of my role as team leader was to knock down barriers for my team.
I’ve seen operations teams pull together a “daily huddle” using a similar format. These meetings only cost 15 minutes of time for the team, but the improvements in performance were observable and immediate. We had increased communications across sub-teams, increased coordination on issue resolution and decreased cycle time on resolving roadblocks.
Managing from the front lines can be hard work, but the best information comes from the front.
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