3 Questions to Ask During Your Daily Scrum

1) What work hasn’t progressed or been updated as anticipated?

Our initial impulse when work stalls is often to set it aside and tackle something else. We do this to maintain a sense of productivity.

However, by introducing more tasks into the system without completing any, we spread our focus, energy, and time thinly, further impeding our ability to finalize tasks. With more unfinished work in the system, there’s an increase in context switching, loose ends, status meetings, and ultimately, waste, all of which slow down our delivery speed.

This underscores the importance of consistently identifying stagnant work on our boards and taking action to get it moving again. Recognizing these stagnant work items enables us to address the issues hindering their progress, allowing them to move forward toward completion rather than accumulating.

2) What is preventing you from completing your tasks?

It’s crucial for team members to articulate why their progress is hindered so that the team can collaborate to resolve the issue.

Some problems are straightforward and merely require communication. For example, subject matter experts (SMEs) can often unblock work by sharing key knowledge. Other situations necessitate coordination. For instance, cards frequently get stuck in feedback states. In such cases, team members can use the standup meeting to request volunteers who can commit to providing the necessary feedback to advance the work.

Since every team routinely encounters blockers and other impediments to flow, it’s wise to plan for post-standup discussions or problem-solving sessions. Some teams allocate 30 minutes for their standup meeting: 15 minutes for the standup itself and 15 minutes for follow-up discussions with only those directly involved.

Document recurring issues as cards on your Kanban board so that team members and leadership can prioritize resolving them once and for all – a fundamental goal of a Kanban system!

3) Are you undertaking any tasks not reflected on the board?

The more tasks we start, the fewer we finish. It’s that simple. That’s why we need WIP limits – to focus on delivering work, not juggling it. However, if we don’t visualize all our work, we can’t effectively control our WIP. Kanban and WIP limits are only as effective as we allow them to be. To manage our work, we must visualize all of it.

For many, Kanban offers the structure and visibility needed to remain on track and deliver faster than ever before, motivating them to visualize everything and leaving them puzzled as to why anyone would do otherwise.

For others, adapting to a system with such transparency can be challenging, particularly if they’re accustomed to doing things their own way. They may be uncomfortable exposing inefficiencies in their processes, discussing problems, or reviewing performance metrics as a team, so they conceal work from the board.