“16th Minute” Agile Daily Stand Up Conversation Starters

The are literally millions of references (1.55 million Google hits in fact) related to that sacred agile event which is the daily stand up. You know, that time of the day when the team comes together to syncronise their focus to ensure they remain on track in achieving their sprint goals?

So before your eyes start rolling backwards, the intent behind this post is not to add to the vast knowledge base that currently exists about what happens during the daily stand up, but more so to discuss those activities that occur afterwards. The things that Scrum Masters need to discuss in order for the team to keep functioning effectively, that may be related to a range of things around quality, administration, team culture or risk.

I’ve coined them the ‘16th minute daily stand up conversation starters’, those ‘other’ activities that should be considered across the various 10 day sprint cycle, but sometimes are either deprioritised or simply forgotten.

This list is by no means exhaustive in nature — it’s purely a prompt for Scrum Masters to start considering . Let’s explore each of these conversation starters in more detail.

The 16th Minute Daily Stand Up Conversation Starters

Day 1 — No stand up

With the teams I support, they don’t typically hold a daily stand up on Day 1 of the sprint, instead they prefer to focus their efforts on sprint planning and preparation.

Day 2 — Recap of the sprint / release goals and velocity

Normally the first day of the sprint is busy with various events and efforts to refocus on a new set of goals for the upcoming fortnight. That is why using Day 2 to recap what was discussed and agreed on Day 1 is a useful 16th minute conversation starter. These details should be visualised within your home zone for reinforcement.

Day 3 — Replay of of retrospective / kaizen actions | confirmation of social activity

Now that the team is clear on the goals and velocity, Day 3 may be an appropriate time to remind the team of the actions that resulted from their recent retrospective. These actions should be captured and clearly visible somewhere within your team’s home zone and tracked regularly with the same importance than other stories.

I encourage all of the teams I work with to spend time outside of the office to bond socially. Day 3 is a good time to collect ideas so logistics can be confirmed well before the end of the sprint.

Day 4 — Alignment with tooling | review of impediments

By Day 4, the team should have found their rhythm, allowing the Scrum Master to also focus on other priorities and help with the flow of the team’s work. I introduced this activity to address a specific problem within our team’s portfolio of keeping both digital and physical boards syncronised. This may or may not apply to your team but it is a useful activity when the Scrum Master attends stand up with a laptop and compares the two boards.

Reviewing impediments should be a daily activity but the team may want to dedicate a particular day to ensure each of them are tracked and actioned.

Day 5 — Team leave calendar

Arguably the quieter period of the sprint for the Scrum Master, Day 5 provides them to focus on important and non-urgent activities such as the team leave calendar. This may be as simple as reviewing it by exception or updating the leave calendar with any imminent release milestones and identifying any possible people risks. By allocating a few minutes each week to this, it prevents the curly and sometimes awkward conversations later on.

Day 6 — Mid-sprint team check-in

The team has reached the half waypoint of the sprint and Scrum Masters may find it an appropriate time to gauge how the team is feeling, not just from a pure delivery sense but from a general wellbeing perspective. This can be done via a number of techniques including a simple Fist of Five or by members writing one word on a post it note and sticking it up on a poster.

Whichever way you feel more comfortable, make sure you don’t ignore deeper smells that surface. Spend some time exploring them as you still have a few days to course correct. Think about if the results of your team check in align to other metrics including the sprint burn down, cycle time or blocked stories. These are useful insights to take into your team’s retrospective at the end of the sprint.

Day 7 Team analysis of the sprint burndown | risks review

It’s at this stage of the sprint that your team’s sprint burn down chart will be highlighting rich insights. If the burndown looks in that ‘safe zone’, normally the conversation will be brief, however if progress have plateaued, maybe a longer discussion is required. The focus of the Scrum Master in this situation is to drive collective ownership and for the team to unearth the solutions. Your role should be not to necessarily solve their problems, but to facilitate a discussion through using open-ended questioning such as “what options do you think we have..?” “how can we help each other…?”

Risks are something that many teams neglect in terms of awareness, discussion and visibility. Risk is everybody’s responsibility — not just the project manager and/or risk team. To help build this wider accountability, I encourage all teams to create and update a simple risk matrix containing all of the risks supported by a brief discussion of all the high priority ones.

By discussing this every fortnight (if not weekly), it becomes ingrained into the team that talking about risks and how we mitigate them is critical. Whether this is done on Day 7 or another day, that’s entirely up to the Scrum Master and the team. When I was Scrum Master, the team knew that every Friday without fail was Risk Day, where we spent a few minutes discussing new and existing team risks.

Day 8 — “Are we gonna make it?”

Your team has just turned the final bend and is heading for the finish line. The standard question Scrum Masters should be asking at this point is ‘are we gonna make it?’ Now, this shouldn’t be a 16th minute question — this could very well be a 1st minute question, depending on the team’s progress. Regardless, there is plenty of conversation taking place about the in-progress stories and a heightened sense of focus from the team.

It’s not uncommon to hear team members in high performing scrum teams say such comments as ‘how can we help you?’ or ‘I need some support’. The Scrum Master’s top priority during this phase is to help remove outstanding impediments and ensure the team is focused on the bigger picture of getting all of the committed stories to done versus just their individual slice of work.

Day 9 — Walk the Board

One day out from the sprint, the focus moves away from individuals and is purely on the outstanding committed stories. Walking the board is a common technique that is useful during the latter days of a sprint — some teams walk the board every day which is a perfectly reasonable as well. By walking the board, the team is able to identify which stories need to be done and by whom and sends a clear message that a full team commitment is required.

Day 10 — Sprint wrap up | sprint review prep | admin close off | retrospective prep

The final day of the sprint is busy. Teams are closing out stories, preparing for showcases, collating data and insights for their retro. Usually responsibilities are shared to ensure all members are contributing and supporting the Scrum Master. I’ve seen teams create sprint rosters which allocate different team members to complete different activities each sprint e.g. facilitate a retrospective, present the showcase. Regardless of what approach your team adopts, it should be collaborative.

There you have it, my humble view on some of the 16th minute daily stand up conversation starters that Scrum Masters should consider. I’d love to hear your views on what other conversation starters could be discussed during a typical sprint.