{"id":6213,"date":"2017-03-24T12:45:58","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T15:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/?p=6213"},"modified":"2017-03-27T13:49:27","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T16:49:27","slug":"bringing-continuous-improvements-into-your-agile-process-a-different-daily-meeting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.plataformatec.com.br\/2017\/03\/bringing-continuous-improvements-into-your-agile-process-a-different-daily-meeting\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing continuous improvements into your agile process: A different Daily Meeting"},"content":{"rendered":"

Congratulations on holding the Reality Check ceremony! You never had the same problem again and now your business plan changes faster according to the nuances of your development plan. (To check what I’m talking about, check the first blog post of this series: Bringing continuous improvements into your agile process: The Reality Check Ceremony<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Your product starts to get fancier, and your clients begin to subscribe… That is just amazing! However, your team is feeling a little unmotivated. You start participating on their retrospectives to check how you can help and you see a pattern: people are complaining, in other words, the Agile Specialist is micromanaging everyone.<\/p>\n

You decide to closely follow the team during a month, investigating what are the things happening there that are discouraging them. Suddenly, you see yourself in a daily meeting, in which everyone talks about what they did and what they’ll do. Soon enough you spot the problem: they are using the daily meeting to report work instead of spreading knowledge and removing blocks. But what now? How to achieve those goals without the reporting feeling?<\/p>\n

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The feeling of a micromanaging daily ceremony always caught me while working in the industry as a developer. I always thought people wanted me to report what I was doing, with the intention of knowing exactly how efficient I was. That caused different kinds of behaviors, the most common was to do more things at once, to show I was working more.<\/p>\n

However, doing more tasks at the same time might slow everything down, make your work less valuable and affect the rest of the team. More on that subject can be found in these blog posts:
\n* Case Study of a WIP Limit Implementation: Why, When and How to use WIP Limits<\/a>
\n* The Hero Syndrome and how to deal with it<\/a><\/p>\n

Therefore, to overcome that situation, we at Plataformatec started using a different approach in the daily meeting. We saw that the problem of the “old way” was that teams were focusing on what each person<\/strong> did instead of on the progress of the project itself. With that in mind, we just changed the focus. Instead of asking people what they did, we started asking cards.<\/p>\n

No, we are not going mad (I guess)… And of course, we didn’t talk to a post-it either (even though talking to inanimate objects may help on development, like rubber ducks<\/a>). However, we changed the way we asked things. Here is how we do it:<\/p>\n

We go over the board, from right to left, asking the whole team how is each card’s development:<\/p>\n