As an experienced Scrum Master with PSM certification and an Agile Coach, I facilitate teams’ progress toward common goals and focus on improving dynamics and performance. Throughout the years of my professional work, I have been responsible for supporting and enforcing the Scrum process and other rules that the team has agreed on.

Agnieszka Pawlicka

Tomasz is a Tech Expert with an enormous experience in both back-end and front-end solutions. He ensures that quality processes and automations are carried out through the whole software development cycle.

Tomasz Bąk

## 5 Key Steps to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively

One of the pillars of agile methodology is a team collocation. It has been proven that teams that work together in the same office report higher effectiveness and better collaboration. **At Selleo we are aware of that fact and for years have been focused on building collocated agile teams**.

However, sometimes a situation independent from us forces us to work remotely. At this moment it is the coronavirus epidemics which disturbed our best practices which have worked well so far.

Working remotely for some time now we confirm that communication is the key aspect for good and effective collaboration. In this article, you can find some key steps on how to run daily scrum, one of the most important meetings, remotely in an effective way. First of all, let us remind what it is all about.

## What is a daily scrum?

A daily scrum meeting or a daily stand-up is a special 15 minute event that helps [scrum teams](https://selleo.com/blog/how-to-build-high-performance-agile-teams) to be **more productive and efficient**. Scrum master is responsible for arranging the meeting so it is held every day at the same time and place. It is also important to keep the timebox, that is why the core idea of the meeting was to run it standing up - just because it helps to keep it short.

## What is the purpose of a daily scrum?

The main idea of the meeting is to spend the dedicated 15 minutes productively by sharing what **we have achieved so far and what we plan to do**. During the meeting, each team member summarizes what he/she did the previous day, what will be done today, and what obstacles does he/she has to overcome.

The meeting’s goal is to assist the product owner and the scrum team to communicate and deliver a better product.

From our experience, we are convinced that daily scrum is a really important event in the agile approach and can be extremely helpful when run efficiently.

Arranging a **15-minutes meeting** is not a unique talent, but the key is to prepare and run a scrum meeting effectively, especially when it is done remotely.

Here we put together some important steps that should be used to run a daily scrum with a remote team to focus your team’s attention and provide the most value for everyone involved.

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### 1. Figure out the best time daily scrum occurs

The first step in organizing an effective scrum meeting remotely is figuring out the logistics. It is important to **hold your daily scrum at the same time** - in such a way you can really strengthen its ritual power.

From our experience at Selleo, we recommend holding a daily scrum at the start of the day so that everyone has a clear idea of what the day holds. However, if you have your team working in different time zones, it is a good option to choose an hour when the majority of your team is starting their day. This way, team members can get aligned on the most important tasks before they start working.

In fact, the most important is that the hour you pick for the meeting should **suit best all the team members**. In such a case you can be certain that they will participate in the meeting more willingly and the meeting will be effective.

### 2. Make sure everyone involved participates

Choosing the best time for everyone is also important for them just to participate in the meeting. Finally, the success of any stand-up meeting depends on **team members’ participation**. If you can’t get people to be engaged in the meeting, most of the value which scrum meeting brings is lost.
At Selleo we are aware that the main goal of daily scrum meeting is to **keep everyone involved** in the project up to date and engaged. This short meeting has really big power when it comes to keeping everyone in the loop.

If participation from your team is lacking, it is important to understand what is the reason behind it. Are time zone challenges the issue? Are there any misunderstandings due to poor audio connection? Maybe schedules don’t fit everyone?

The power of scrum methodology is the **inspect and adapt approach** which you can do during every scrum event. But if you would like to discuss the issue more deeply, please use the retrospective meeting to get insights from the team why the participation is lacking.

### 3. Have a solid audio / video setup

Sometimes the best meeting can be ruined by poor communication related to wrong audio / video setup.

For remote teams, it is absolutely critical for an **effective stand-up meeting to have a solid A/V configuration**. If you can’t hear or understand your teammates well, you can lose the important details which can have an impact on your later work. It also really frustrating when you spent your meeting time troubleshooting and in fact wasting everyone’s time.

There is a lot of tools which enable you to run a remote meeting, both with audio and video capabilities, but you should always make sure that it works for all team members and **everyone can hear and see one another**.

### 4. Keep it short

A stand-up meeting, no matter if you have one week sprint or one month, should always take no longer than 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter if it is held in-person or online. It is important to keep the timeboxing because the goal of the meeting is to synchronize with the team members **instead of running long discussions**. If the daily scrum runs longer than 15 minutes, you need to take a closer look at the root cause and address it. Please check if your team is well prepared for the meeting, if they update the rest in a **clear manner and cut the long discussions**. You should also check if your team is not too large. In scrum, an effective team should consist of no more than **9 members**.

If something comes up during the scrum meetings, it should be discussed during the separate meeting among people directly involved in that issue. The daily scrum is not the time to dive deep into the planning or technical details of software development. You should only indicate the issue and **plan the separate meeting** for that, this is sometimes called a sidebar or parking lot. At Selleo, to keep things moving along, scrum master dedicated to the team facilitates the meeting and in such cases keeps an eye on the duration of the meeting and cuts long discussions immediately.

### 5. Use a standard set of questions

To help keep the scrum meeting both short and effective, you can always use standard questions which are included in the **scrum guide**. Regardless of whether your team is co-located or working remotely, the best scrum meeting consists of team members answering the consistent questions. This helps them prepare as they know in advance what information they are expected to share during the meeting. Those questions are as follows:

#### *What did I do yesterday?*

This easy question help team members share **what they accomplished** since the previous scrum meeting. It is important that updates focus on deliverables allowing the entire team to understand what work has been done. The team member should also emphasize how the work is done, which helps the team get closer to the sprint goal.

#### *What are my plans for today?*

This question is focused on the **plan for the upcoming day** until the next scrum meeting will be held. Team members should say what they are going to do to help the whole team understand which tasks remain. When answering the question, it is also important to keep the goal of the sprint in mind, so that the team members don’t go off the track.

#### *Are there any obstacles?*

This question is probably the most critical one. If something is **blocking the progress, you should know it asap**. Team members should share anything that blocks them from getting the job to be done. Unresolved impediments can be extremely harmful to your team’s velocity and overall project success.

But again, it is important to answer these questions in a timely manner and clear for all team members. People should avoid technical details, not focus on the implementation of the task, but only share the status of their work. As mentioned earlier, deeper discussions should be run during a separate meeting with the people involved.

## Closing thoughts

While no one knows how long the COVID-19 epidemics will last, it seems that many of us will be working remotely for at least a couple of weeks. **The daily scrum is a valuable time that should be treated as a collaborative effort for the whole team to keep remote teams functioning effectively.**

Try not to think about the scrum meeting as strict rules but more as a way to maximize productivity. Then you will see that it is an effective tool for your development team, especially when they are distributed.

Are you looking for an **experienced scrum master** to facilitate your meetings? Or a **fully-fledged team** of development specialists to build your next product? [Meet Selleo engineers](https://selleo.com/software-development-team/ecommerce#agnieszka-pawlicka)!

One of the pillars of agile methodology is a team collocation. It has been proven that teams that work together in the same office report higher effectiveness and better collaboration.

How to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively?

A “team” in the Agile sense is a small group of people, who work together on a project, nearly all of them on a full-time basis. A team should possess all the skills necessary to get the job done and entails shared accountability.

However, imagine passionates who **are highly motivated** and **engaged as a team**, who contribute directly towards achieving your business goals by **delivering exceptional digital products.**

What makes them do so? What are the secrets of **great teams**?

Below you can find **six key elements which I consider as valid and crucial for setting-up solid Agile teams**. We always keep them in the back of our mind when building and leading our Agile teams at Selleo and we recommend them to consider while setting up your own team.

### 1. Build upon a solid foundation

Incorporating **common values** in Agile teams is crucial to create a culture of work that is collaborative in the first place. It forms a solid foundation that brings together all team members and fosters integration. Collaboration simply means to work together to accomplish a task. Agile methodologies stress the benefits of working with cross-functional teams rather than working in functional silos. It promotes frequent communication and cooperation between team members which helps to avoid any misunderstandings and to get things done faster.

From our experience, team bondings and its dynamics get better with time and people are more productive when they trust each other and enjoy working together. It also takes time to understand how individual team member’s skills complement the skills of another peer.  At Selleo, we promote the way of **self-organising and self-managing** client-focused team, which is possible due to the flat and network structure of the company. Teams at Selleo are collocated in the office so they can easily integrate with each other not only through formal and scheduled meetings but also through small chitchats, informal discussions or common afterwork activities. Establishing a strong team is not about sending your team members to team building events and expecting greater results from the team. High-performing teams take some time to build so try to keep your teams together.

<ReadMore> Read also: [Agile Software Development Process – Everything You Need to Know](https://selleo.com/blog/agile-software-development-process-everything-you-need-to-know) </ReadMore>

### 2. Establish strong engineering practices

Beyond keeping the team together, it's really important to build the sequence of the best engineering practices like code reviews, continuous integration and deployment, sharing the codebase between all the software developers and a single coding standard to which all the programmers adhere. At Selleo, we have implemented **high-quality engineering practices**, like automated tests, builds and deployments as well as daily practices in code review and quality assurance of software development in order to increase the confidence of the team and the quality of the service they deliver. A better quality of code and lack of technical debt are achieved by the regular, rigorous refactoring during software development. High-performing agile teams are aware that strong engineering fundamentals are crucial for delivering great digital products.

### 3. Ensure continuous mentoring

In order to support individual team member’s development, there is a huge need for creating an environment where the peers can learn from each other. **Pair-programming sessions, TILs, code reviews, and feedback** - these are some of the instruments we use at Selleo on a daily basis as encouragement to share the knowledge across the teams. Mentoring is not just an activity for a junior member to learn from seniors. Everyone from the team can learn from each other in order to unlock their power as a whole to tackle diverse and sophisticated work.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/800x533/c48e4b07e1/teams.jpg)

When the team members work well together and have good relationships they also use informal discussions as a common way of sharing knowledge. They are motivated to share experience across the team because they have a common goal -  to deliver their work with the highest quality.

At Selleo. we love to **reward people who never stop learning**, never stop growing and never stop helping others to grow. We do our best to deliver to people everything they need to make them grow continuously, and we are aware that being helpful and sharing knowledge with the colleagues are the values which high-performing teams are equipped with. You can also help your teams by creating efficient and successful mechanisms for knowledge sharing across and beyond the team with management and various specialists.

<Baner name={scrum-master} />

### 4. Create a cross-functional team

High-performing Agile teams comprise individuals with a broad set of skills that are necessary to effectively accomplish the work from their backlog. Team members must be **open and highly motivated** and the team must have both the authority and the accountability to achieve the goals they have been given. Typical cross-functional team at Selleo can do a lot of different stuff because it includes software engineers who have expertise both on the back-end and/or front-end of the software product. It also may include e.g. designers, testers and user experience (UX) specialists, if those activities are necessary to get the work done as a team.  
The key aspect here is that the high-performance team should be able to **deliver the results of their work by combining their respective skills and talents**.

### 5. Communicate the big picture and goal

Team members work better when they know how their work is aligned with the overall goal and when it contributes to the bigger picture. It is not about picking up stories from the backlog without understanding what value it brings to the entire vision. This approach is not effective. It is important to invest time in communicating the bigger picture, the current priorities and goals to the team in order to **increase engagement and ownership**.

![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/a.storyblok.com/f/86602/800x533/230160ae0b/goals.jpg)

At Selleo we work according to the **Scrum and Agile methodology** and we always encourage the Product Owners to share their vision and goals to the Development Team at each stage of the project. We insist on communicating the vision early and often - this communication should start from the kickoff meeting and continue throughout the entire development cycle.  Common goals are important not only because they develop creativity and innovation but because they bring people together and encourage them to communicate problems and results. There is such a notion of ‘feature teams’ in Agile, where a team owns a particular area of the software application, but with a better understanding of the overall goal, they feel responsible for the project as a whole.

### 6. Empower the team with decision-making

In order for the Agile team to work effectively, the team members should be **empowered to make their own decisions**. As mentioned before they need to be presented with the bigger picture in order to set up their own goals in alignment with the overall goal. The team needs to understand what work is to be done but they are given the freedom to find their own solutions and ways of working. At Selleo, Agile teams work according to the best practices and when they have a feeling of total ownership, which again is possible due to flat and network structure, it creates much better results. Freedom in decision-making for the Agile teams creates a culture of creativity and an environment which promotes challenging tasks constructively.

## Closing thoughts

In essence, those six elements are crucial while setting-up the Agile teams, however, it takes some time and effort to build a high-performing team with strong fundamentals and broad set of skills.

We can observe our customers’ satisfaction growing from the cooperation with our Agile teams. We can ensure that, when the team is mature, has strong practices both on collaboration and engineering, and in addition is established with the freedom of decision-making and ownership it delivers much **better value to customer experience and improves overall service and product quality**.

After all, what makes a good team great is the ability to **focus on the common goal** which brings all the team members together and increases their engagement, interactions and communication.

It is also essential to instil positivity in team members and encourage them to share their knowledge and thoughts across the team. These are the fuels of productivity which help the team grow continuously.

Imagine passionates who are highly motivated and engaged as a team, who contribute directly towards achieving your business goals by delivering exceptional digital products. What makes them do so? What are the secrets of great teams? 

How To Build High-Performance Agile Teams

The core principle of the lean approach is to focus on value for the customer and at the same time eliminate waste. “Value” is defined as any action or process that the customer would be willing to pay for. “Waste” in turn is any action or process that does not add value.

### The focus on value

In software value is what users will value once they start using the software. Such value, however, is very likely to change in time if only because users may often not know exactly what they want; what is more, when they see the software “in action”, their idea of what they want will invariably shift.

Making improvements little-but-often creates a learning environment which allows to truly discover and deliver value to end users. The first version of [Gmail was literally written in a day](https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html) and in the early days every new feature went live soon after it had been programmed, and most new ideas were implemented shortly after they had been conceived. It is the subsequent users’ feedback / behaviour that helped to establish what was valuable and directed the effort towards the outcome we are able to appreciate today.

### **Eliminate waste!**

![Img](https://a.storyblok.com/f/86602/624x234/7ca30006db/rysunek1.jpg)

Lean defines waste as anything you do that does not add customer value or delays the delivery of value to customers. In software development this may translate into the following common forms of waste:

### **Partially done work**

Some examples of partially done work include:

* specifications and requirement documents created too early
* code which is not covered with tests
* code which is not deployed to production

Some of the practices which helps to eliminate partially done work are to divide the work to be done into small batches or short iterations and do detailed requirements specifications just before an iteration. At the end of each iteration, it is a good idea to stick to a simple rule: either code is integrated, tested and accepted, or it does not count at all.

Frequent deployments have an additional benefit of reducing the risk of delivering wrong features, because the users who start using a minimum feature implementation can often immediately provide valuable feedback with which to decide on how the feature should be developed further. Therefore, avoid writing requirements too early – in each iteration you learn something new which positively affects your ability to structure the contents of the next iteration.

**Too many features**

The worst form of waste in software development is adding features that are not essential. There is a remedy which helps to guard against the practice: be strongly biased against adding features. If there is any doubt about the need for a feature, wait with it.

Every line of code adds to the complexity of the solution you are building and exponentially increases the workload and cost of further development and maintenance. Successful software development requires a process that results in the implementation of the 20% of the code that will deliver 80% of the value.

### **Slow communications or feedback bottlenecks**

Developers make critical decisions about every 15 minutes. The longer they have to wait for answers from the Product Owner, the other developers on the team, the users or other stakeholders, the slower the process and the lower the quality of their decisions. If developers have to wait too often / for too long, they tend to lose momentum and find it hard to resist the temptation to switch to other tasks where they can apply their knowledge, skills and expertise in a more productive fashion.

At the key moments during project execution, like the project kickstart, consider the various ways to facilitate the information flows among the people involved. For example, collocate the complete cross-functional team in the same office for close physical collaboration. Depending on what you feel is more effective, invite the development team to your office or go to work with them on their premises.

You may as well consider putting all the documents needed into the cloud (for example, Google Docs, MyBalsamiq). Such tools make it easier to keep everyone up to date on what is going on and allow the people involved to work on changes collaboratively. When you are not in the same office, skype screen sharing can be used for face-to-face discussion, direct observation, as well as the interaction with mock-ups and prototypes.

### **FINAL WORD – LEAN**

Lean is centred around **preserving value with less work**. To achieve the effect it promotes the development of a change-oriented mindset which promptly responds to the future as it unfolds. Together with your development team, pose hypotheses, conduct rapid experiments and implement only the best alternatives!

Once you master quick delivery and short feedback loops, focus on the elimination of waste. Your goal is to deliver working and valuable software to users; everything that slows this process down is waste and should thus be eradicated.

The core principle of the lean approach in software development is to focus on value for the customer and at the same time eliminate waste.

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