Monthly News from Mike Cohn and Mountain Goat Software

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. 02 Apr 2013 Hi ,   Avoid Taking Notes During the Daily Scrum On a consulting engagement a few years ago, the VP who had brought me had me start the day observing a few daily scrums. In each meeting I noticed the different ScrumMasters appeared to be taking very detailed notes. At lunch I asked the VP about this. He told me that he’d asked all ScrumMasters to do this a few weeks prior. Each ScrumMaster emailed the notes to him and he combined them into a daily email to the whole company so that, he said, everyone could benefit. After he told me this, he added, “Funny thing, though. Those meetings aren’t as helpful as they used to be. Hardly anything critical seems to come up in them any more.” I wonder why. Perhaps it was because “I’m going to be five minutes on the such-and-such task” gets turned into “Mike is late” in an email to the whole company. I always advise ScrumMasters against taking notes during the daily scrum. If you do want to take notes, I recommend writing the note on a whiteboard or some place where everyone participating in the meeting can see what you write. I know I’m cynical but I often think people think the ScrumMaster is writing the worst possible thing when it’s written in private. The ScrumMaster might be writing “Get Mike some help on the such-and-such task” but I think she’s writing “Have Mike moved off the team.” Taking notes on the whiteboard has the further advantage of letting anyone add to the notes during the meeting or easily refer to them later. If any notes are action items, they’ll be on the board the next day when any old notes can be easily erased. So, take notes in a public place, even if you’re making a note to move me off the team. Tell Me What You Want to Read About In order to make sure I'm discussing the topics you are most interested in, I'd really appreciate it if you could take a minute to fill in this one question survey. I'll use the topic suggestions from this survey in both my newsletter and blog. Below are three popular articles on the ScrumMaster role. Daily Scrum: Not Just for ScrumMasters I never refer to the daily scrum (or daily standup) meeting as a “status meeting.” The term “status meeting” is too pejorative for most of us. For me it conjures images of sitting around a table with each person giving an update to a project manager... Continue Reading... Check In, Don’t Check Up I've never been a micro-manager, especially not since using agile and Scrum. I could have turned into a micro-manager early in career, except I've always been too busy to spend my time checking up on people. But, while I've avoiding checking.... Continue Reading... The Role of Leaders on a Self-Organizing Team Self-organization is a fundamental concept in agile project management. The Agile Manifesto includes the principle, "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams." Yet a common misconception about agile project management approaches is... Continue Reading... Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software has Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner, Succeeding with Agile, Effective User Stories and Agile Estimating & Planning courses scheduled in Boulder, Copenhagen, Dallas, London, Orange County, Oslo, San Diego, and Silicon Valley.

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