Daily Stand-Up / Scrum Kickoff

Today was day 3 of our adoption of Daily Stand-Up / Scrum meetings at GS1 Canada. I've chosen an open location and policy for observers (a nice crowd formed today). So far so good - lots of positive feedback on the format and value. The following is how I introduced the concept here:

Agenda:
1) Accomplishments since the last meeting
2) Planned activities before the next meeting
3) Identification of any blockers that are preventing progress

The result should be the following benefits:
- knowledge sharing / reuse scenario identification
- quickly identify sore spots that require further deep dive follow-up meetings / actions
- dynamic balancing of work assignments as people have availability and projects can benefit from additional resources that are not dedicated to them
- build the team work / sense of commitment to each other

Please be on time, we will start promptly and this should only take 10-15 minutes once we get into a rhythm. The idea is not to talk a lot but to say what needs to be said. Resist the urge to get into detailed requirements or design conversations - this is quick status and identification of issues. We can decide to have a few people hang back and get into deeper conversations once the main group meeting is complete. The remainder of the hour is reserved for that purpose so everyone knows there is a set time for these things if they need them.

Read these:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicken_and_the_Pig (follow the external link to here as well: http://www.agilemanagement.net/Articles/Weblog/ChickensandPigs.html)
- Big Visible Charts (http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/BigVisibleCharts.htm). The release planning chart is an example of that and we can do more as we go… A corkboard will be put up for QA and Support to fill with status and issues that development must address.
- http://www.controlchaos.com/old-site/implem.htm and http://www.effectivemeetings.com/teams/teamwork/scrum.asp (focus on the scrum philosophy and meeting style - less on the sprint iteration, something we might contemplate in the future but not immediately).
- http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/daily_scrum (especially the bottom section on impediments / blockers).

Developers and QA are the Pigs. PMs and business stakeholders are Chickens. Support are Pigkens (we'll work on that)… Obviously, everyone is fully committed to all of our initiatives and we don't mean to imply otherwise. This is mainly a tool for development and QA to plan and track our work effort and ensure we're each doing the most important things we can be doing on a daily basis. Having others attend the meeting should provide mutual benefit in knowledge sharing and issue identification / resolution and will naturally provoke healthy follow-up conversations.

This is an open meeting. Everyone can feel welcome to forward this invite to other chickens and pigkens as long as they are told to stand on the outside of the pigs and observe silently unless spoken to. We can do a quick hand raise at the end for chickens to ask questions. We'll work on the format as we go…

I expect the result will be that it becomes easy for anyone to quickly see where we are and where we are going as a team and what we need help with (blockers).

I've not specifically gone to any lengths to "sell" Agile, Extreme Programming or Scrum. Some of the values and practices were discussed briefly in my Team Introduction. Beyond that I am trying to foster adoption without any great fuss. This meeting is more Stand-Up than proper Scrum as we have not yet begun moving toward sprinting in iterations and working off backlogs.

I hope this might help someone else get over the early hump of adoption. The benefits demand a concerted effort...