Challenging the Status Report Mentality in Daily Scrums

Whether or not you are a fan of Star Trek, you’ve likely heard of the Captain of the U.S.S Enterprise asking some form of this question: “Engineering, status report?” or “Spock, status report?” (It’s such a common trope that Season 2, episode 9 of Star Trek: Brave New Worlds, “Subspace Rhapsody,” features an iconic scene where the crew has encountered something that is making them all sing their status reports.)
On a ship, even a spaceship, status reports are a quick and efficient way to check that all systems are running as expected or to report problems. On waterfall software projects, status reports often were an effective but often tedious way for a manager to update their Gantt chart to reflect the progress (or lack thereof) for each plan element.
Unfortunately the idea of status reports is so embedded in our psyches that many people on agile teams treat a daily scrum as a time to give a status report to the Scrum Master.
The daily scrum is meant to be a synchronization meeting for the whole team, not a status report solely for the benefit of the Scrum Master. So how did we end up here?
I suspect some people missed the message that a daily scrum is an inspect and adapt activity for the team. And I wonder if the three traditional questions of the daily scrum are to blame as well. The template, “What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? Any blockers?” just sounds like a robotic status report Spock would give.
Two Ways to Bring Sync Back to Daily Scrums
Want to break your team out of the status report mindset? Try these two tips.
First, eliminate the three questions and experiment with structures that work for your team. At your next retrospective, tell the team you want to dispose of the three questions (and why). Remind them of the purpose of daily scrums: to inspect and adapt the team’s progress. And that the goal is to make each daily scrum about synching their work, rather than reporting status, while staying inside the 15-minute timebox.
Then invite the team to come up with experiments to try (like going PBI by PBI instead of person by person).
Second, for one sprint try to avoid eye contact with anyone giving an update during a daily scrum, especially doing them in person. Making eye contact is human nature. When we speak, we make eye contact with someone. Many teams, especially those new to Scrum, will naturally look at the ScrumMaster when speaking rather than one another.
By not making eye contact with someone giving an update, ScrumMasters can signal that the speaker should be talking to the rest of the team, rather than directly to the Scrum Master.
If your daily scrums are so dull that the team is silently begging to be beamed up, you aren’t alone. Bringing a collaborative spirit back to your daily scrums is one way to help your team succeed with agile.

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