Tips from a Scrum Master: Focus Your Commitments

In my continuing series of Tips from a Scrum Master, we look at the daily stand up meeting.

The daily stand up meeting presents the Scrum Master with a very timely view into the team's planned activities for the day, or at least it should. Many stand up meetings that I have observed over the years have wandered a bit from the all important intent of team members "Making commitments in front of peers". Instead people fall back into the more comfortable position of reporting what they did yesterday. Don't get me wrong, I want each member of the team to quickly summarize yesterday's accomplishments, but I want it to be very quick, something like, "Yesterday I planned to finish the work on story 215. I have about another hour's worth of integration testing today before it will be finished."

Reporting on the work from the previous day validates that the commitment was met. However, if a commitment was never given then the team member is just telling you what they did the day before and these two things are completely different.

Repeatedly delivering on commitments builds a pattern of success. This pattern of success becomes addictive. People enjoy the satisfaction felt after accomplishing a goal. When you have a team that has built a reputation for delivering on their commitments they focus very sharply to keep that feeling and to protect that reputation. As the Scrum Master you might need to push the team harder at times if they become too conservative with their daily commitments, but only if their conservatism slows down the sprint.

So give it a try. Ask the members of your team to focus their updates on what they plan to accomplish today and make them accountable for delivering on those comittments. Start building a pattern of success for your team Today!