As an experienced Scrum Master with PSM certification and an Agile Coach, I facilitate teams’ progress toward common goals and focus on improving dynamics and performance. Throughout the years of my professional work, I have been responsible for supporting and enforcing the Scrum process and other rules that the team has agreed on.

Agnieszka Pawlicka

Tomasz is a Tech Expert with an enormous experience in both back-end and front-end solutions. He ensures that quality processes and automations are carried out through the whole software development cycle.

Tomasz Bąk

## 5 Key Steps to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively

One of the pillars of agile methodology is a team collocation. It has been proven that teams that work together in the same office report higher effectiveness and better collaboration. **At Selleo we are aware of that fact and for years have been focused on building collocated agile teams**.

However, sometimes a situation independent from us forces us to work remotely. At this moment it is the coronavirus epidemics which disturbed our best practices which have worked well so far.

Working remotely for some time now we confirm that communication is the key aspect for good and effective collaboration. In this article, you can find some key steps on how to run daily scrum, one of the most important meetings, remotely in an effective way. First of all, let us remind what it is all about.

## What is a daily scrum?

A daily scrum meeting or a daily stand-up is a special 15 minute event that helps [scrum teams](https://selleo.com/blog/how-to-build-high-performance-agile-teams) to be **more productive and efficient**. Scrum master is responsible for arranging the meeting so it is held every day at the same time and place. It is also important to keep the timebox, that is why the core idea of the meeting was to run it standing up - just because it helps to keep it short.

## What is the purpose of a daily scrum?

The main idea of the meeting is to spend the dedicated 15 minutes productively by sharing what **we have achieved so far and what we plan to do**. During the meeting, each team member summarizes what he/she did the previous day, what will be done today, and what obstacles does he/she has to overcome.

The meeting’s goal is to assist the product owner and the scrum team to communicate and deliver a better product.

From our experience, we are convinced that daily scrum is a really important event in the agile approach and can be extremely helpful when run efficiently.

Arranging a **15-minutes meeting** is not a unique talent, but the key is to prepare and run a scrum meeting effectively, especially when it is done remotely.

Here we put together some important steps that should be used to run a daily scrum with a remote team to focus your team’s attention and provide the most value for everyone involved.

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### 1. Figure out the best time daily scrum occurs

The first step in organizing an effective scrum meeting remotely is figuring out the logistics. It is important to **hold your daily scrum at the same time** - in such a way you can really strengthen its ritual power.

From our experience at Selleo, we recommend holding a daily scrum at the start of the day so that everyone has a clear idea of what the day holds. However, if you have your team working in different time zones, it is a good option to choose an hour when the majority of your team is starting their day. This way, team members can get aligned on the most important tasks before they start working.

In fact, the most important is that the hour you pick for the meeting should **suit best all the team members**. In such a case you can be certain that they will participate in the meeting more willingly and the meeting will be effective.

### 2. Make sure everyone involved participates

Choosing the best time for everyone is also important for them just to participate in the meeting. Finally, the success of any stand-up meeting depends on **team members’ participation**. If you can’t get people to be engaged in the meeting, most of the value which scrum meeting brings is lost.
At Selleo we are aware that the main goal of daily scrum meeting is to **keep everyone involved** in the project up to date and engaged. This short meeting has really big power when it comes to keeping everyone in the loop.

If participation from your team is lacking, it is important to understand what is the reason behind it. Are time zone challenges the issue? Are there any misunderstandings due to poor audio connection? Maybe schedules don’t fit everyone?

The power of scrum methodology is the **inspect and adapt approach** which you can do during every scrum event. But if you would like to discuss the issue more deeply, please use the retrospective meeting to get insights from the team why the participation is lacking.

### 3. Have a solid audio / video setup

Sometimes the best meeting can be ruined by poor communication related to wrong audio / video setup.

For remote teams, it is absolutely critical for an **effective stand-up meeting to have a solid A/V configuration**. If you can’t hear or understand your teammates well, you can lose the important details which can have an impact on your later work. It also really frustrating when you spent your meeting time troubleshooting and in fact wasting everyone’s time.

There is a lot of tools which enable you to run a remote meeting, both with audio and video capabilities, but you should always make sure that it works for all team members and **everyone can hear and see one another**.

### 4. Keep it short

A stand-up meeting, no matter if you have one week sprint or one month, should always take no longer than 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter if it is held in-person or online. It is important to keep the timeboxing because the goal of the meeting is to synchronize with the team members **instead of running long discussions**. If the daily scrum runs longer than 15 minutes, you need to take a closer look at the root cause and address it. Please check if your team is well prepared for the meeting, if they update the rest in a **clear manner and cut the long discussions**. You should also check if your team is not too large. In scrum, an effective team should consist of no more than **9 members**.

If something comes up during the scrum meetings, it should be discussed during the separate meeting among people directly involved in that issue. The daily scrum is not the time to dive deep into the planning or technical details of software development. You should only indicate the issue and **plan the separate meeting** for that, this is sometimes called a sidebar or parking lot. At Selleo, to keep things moving along, scrum master dedicated to the team facilitates the meeting and in such cases keeps an eye on the duration of the meeting and cuts long discussions immediately.

### 5. Use a standard set of questions

To help keep the scrum meeting both short and effective, you can always use standard questions which are included in the **scrum guide**. Regardless of whether your team is co-located or working remotely, the best scrum meeting consists of team members answering the consistent questions. This helps them prepare as they know in advance what information they are expected to share during the meeting. Those questions are as follows:

#### *What did I do yesterday?*

This easy question help team members share **what they accomplished** since the previous scrum meeting. It is important that updates focus on deliverables allowing the entire team to understand what work has been done. The team member should also emphasize how the work is done, which helps the team get closer to the sprint goal.

#### *What are my plans for today?*

This question is focused on the **plan for the upcoming day** until the next scrum meeting will be held. Team members should say what they are going to do to help the whole team understand which tasks remain. When answering the question, it is also important to keep the goal of the sprint in mind, so that the team members don’t go off the track.

#### *Are there any obstacles?*

This question is probably the most critical one. If something is **blocking the progress, you should know it asap**. Team members should share anything that blocks them from getting the job to be done. Unresolved impediments can be extremely harmful to your team’s velocity and overall project success.

But again, it is important to answer these questions in a timely manner and clear for all team members. People should avoid technical details, not focus on the implementation of the task, but only share the status of their work. As mentioned earlier, deeper discussions should be run during a separate meeting with the people involved.

## Closing thoughts

While no one knows how long the COVID-19 epidemics will last, it seems that many of us will be working remotely for at least a couple of weeks. **The daily scrum is a valuable time that should be treated as a collaborative effort for the whole team to keep remote teams functioning effectively.**

Try not to think about the scrum meeting as strict rules but more as a way to maximize productivity. Then you will see that it is an effective tool for your development team, especially when they are distributed.

Are you looking for an **experienced scrum master** to facilitate your meetings? Or a **fully-fledged team** of development specialists to build your next product? [Meet Selleo engineers](https://selleo.com/software-development-team/ecommerce#agnieszka-pawlicka)!

One of the pillars of agile methodology is a team collocation. It has been proven that teams that work together in the same office report higher effectiveness and better collaboration.

How to Run Remote Daily Scrum Meeting Effectively?

Nowadays, working with remote teams is often a necessity and although it is a great option to access talented engineers from all around the world, many leaders are scared to take the full advantage of such a solution. The lack of knowledge on how to manage those collaborations is what discourages them and ultimately stops from working with remote teams. In this article, I will present essential tips on how to work and manage remote teams.

### 1. Set clear expectations and explain the process

Before you start the development it is crucial to **set clear expectations** and **explain the full product vision**. The developers you hire should be aware of the final goal and the direction towards they will be heading. This will ensure your team knows what success looks like to you and rule out most of the misunderstandings.

It is important to have the process you follow **well-documented** and send out during onboarding. It should include your expectations for availability, tools they will be working with as well as work expectations.  General words like ‘well’, ‘qucikly’ or ‘done’ can be ambiguous and misleading, so keep in mind to express yourself clearly and precisely.

**Set core values and distribute goals** into smaller time frames eg. present monthly or quarterly goal expectations to keep the team on track and allow further adjustments.

### 2. Communicate often

The most important factor of a successful remote collaboration is **communication**. Since the team you are working with is not physically present in your office, you do not have the opportunity to talk face-to-face on a daily basis. This is why a regular, often scheduled communication is crucial to outsourcing success. Plan short **daily standups, weekly plannings, and scrum, team building, meetings**. 

Your responsibility is to respond to messages as quickly as possible to avoid breaks in production. Be accessible and open to feedback. Value your and other’s time.

Make use of various channels to communicate: **use chat and video**. A written form of communication will ensure that everything discussed is documented and available for future reference while video helps to build a more intimate relationship.\
Do not be afraid to use emoticons or gifs to strengthen your reaction and introduce a more relaxed atmosphere - non-verbal communication is as important as verbal communication.

Try not to overlook company-wide communication. **Provide frequent updates** to the on-site team, so they also know how the work is going.

When communicating, take time to get to know your remote team. Do not forget about small talks, ask about their hobbies or families. This will demonstrate you care about them and their well being, which will have a positive influence on your relationship.

### 3. Make time for one-on-one and face-to-face meetings

When working with remote teams it is important to make time for **one-on-one meetings**, preferably through a video chat. This will give you an opportunity to have an honest conversation with each team member which will further influence the overall level of happiness. Frequent chats will ensure you stay on top of things.

Try to arrange at least once a year an in-person meeting with the entire team - fly them over or, if possible, visit their offices. This will give you the opportunity to spend time together outside the work environment.

### 4. Choose the right tools

Ensuring that your team is working with the same tools as you are is an inherent step. At the very beginning of the project, you should choose the tools which you will be using to communicate, document progress, track time etc.

Project management tools like [Trello](https://trello.com) or [Jira](https://www.atlassian.com/pl/software/jira) will help to organize work and distribute tasks. By using that, everybody on the team will know **who is currently working on which task**, which ones were finished or need to be reviewed. Weekly plannings and reviews based on those ticketing systems will give you information on the progress, which tasks need more time to be completed or which ones you can get rid off. Trello and Jira are also a great place to **document ideas and future functions**.

[Slack](https://slack.com/intl/en-pl/) is probably one of the most popular chat and video solutions. It allows sending private messages, making calls, creating public or private channels dedicated to various topics eg. a channel with important company-wide announcements or one for the off-shore team only. It supports emoji and gifs as well as file sharing.

Google also gives you a great variety of tools that you can make use. [Google Calendar](https://calendar.google.com/calendar/r) will help you schedule calls and meetings while keeping you up-to-date with time zone differences and possible public holidays. [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com) is a great cloud environment to store all the important files on. It gives you the ability to create and share documents, presentations, spreadsheets as well as keep your documentation or framework guides handy.

### 5. Balance schedule

Timezones are tricky. Especially if you and your team are on the complete opposite sides of the world. This, however, does not make the collaboration impossible, just trickier. When planning meetings it is important to **take into consideration the time differences**, national holidays etc. Aim to find a time that works for both of the sides, but if that is impossible be the side who wakes up earlier or stays up late in order to take the inconvenience off of your partners. Here, make use of already mentioned Google Calendar - it will ensure everybody knows the schedule, send notifications when before a meeting and help to overcome time differences.

### 6. Track performance

When handling remote teams it is important to keep track of the progress they are making. Make use of **productivity tracking software** in order to ensure your employees stay focused and on the right track. Those tools can also aid in performance reviews and help to set clear objectives within specified time frames. There are many goal tracking and OKR tools you can use.

Before implementing such tools remember to properly introduce the technology to the entire team. They should understand it is not a way of controlling them, just helping them to manage their time, fight distractions and improve concentration.

Those tools will also come in handy when **calculating payrolls.**

### Summary

A well managed remote team is what stands behind a successful outsourced project. \
**Clear expectations, good communication and proper tools are the key elements of an amazing collaboration**.

Nowadays, working with remote teams is often a necessity and although it is a great option to access talented engineers from all around the world, many leaders are scared to take the full advantage of such a solution. 

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