Why the Daily Scrum is NOT a Status Meeting?

I am here today to debunk, The Myth “The Daily Scrum is the Status Meeting”. This is a key misconception in the industry and often results in Scrum meetings, eating up hours from the development team. It’s an understandable observation because they sound may be similar on the surface. This reduces the value & purpose of the Daily Scrum.

To begin with, why it is important to debunk this Myth?

Actually the effectiveness of the Daily Scrum is depending upon this in multiple ways.

What is the Purpose of the Daily Scrum ?

According to the Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect the progress towards the sprint goals, to synchronize activities and to create a plan for the next 24 hours. It’s by the development team & for the development team.  Its time box is 15 minutes & it happens every day.

What is the Status Meeting?

The Status Meeting has no one definition. However, traditionally, it is considered as an opportunity where different team members come together and give an update on their progress for the tasks they have been working on to somebody else typically who is maintaining the plan. It may be a project manager, team lead, It could be a manager.

Here are the some key differences between the Daily Scrum and Status Meetings.

Significant Differences between Daily Scrum and Status Meeting:

Scrum Promotes Self-Organization

The Daily Scrum promotes self-organization which is the heart of Agility as far as the heart of Scrum. The development team has shared accountability to create a Done increment and helps them identify their progress on the sprint backlog. By having this event every day where the development team can analyze their progress and it helps the development team to self-organize and fulfill their accountability.

If the Daily Scrum is treated as a status meeting, it results in development team giving progress updates without any accountability and ownership. This reduces the overall empowerment of the team to make a decision and it rather falls on the manager to make decisions.

Scrum Maximize The Transparency

The Daily Scrum helps to maximize the transparency that enables frequent inspections and adaptation.

Scrum promotes an empirical approach to deal with complexity and unpredictability in software development by promoting transparency.

If the development team members are responsible and they are aware of what’s  going-on, they can use the available information to make informed decisions which ensures progress towards the sprint goal.

If the development team members consider this a status meeting and just report their progress to somebody else without taking responsibility and accountability, the transparency will be lost. The other thing not emphasized is the adaptation part in this inspect and adapt cycle.

Achieving Valuable Outcomes

The entire point of Daily Scrum is to focus towards achieving valuable outcomes. . The entire point in scrum is Done and the sprint goal what helping guide the development team in terms of what is the purpose of doing this in the sprint. By getting daily progress updates, the team can analyze and identify items which may hinder in achieving the sprint goal and the problem can be resolved at hand.

Scrum Promotes Collaboration

The Daily Scrum promotes collaboration. What people in the team are working on, If everybody is on the same page and their focus is on their shared accountabilities this is bringing that opportunity for more collaboration & this is why its often called a collaborative planning session.

No one person but rather the development team owns the development plan. The focus is shifted from individual contribution to the collaborative team effort.

With the above mentioned facts, I hope I have shut some lie on this myth. This can help you to go back to your team and look at how you are facilitating your Daily Scrums? Are you really achieving your purpose? Is this a collaborative planning session? Are we inspecting, adapting and focusing on a valuable outcome?