Here are a couple things we tried for our scrum teams.
We let them choose the time of the day for the daily stand-up. One team agreed on 11am. Another on 5pm. Some people see this 15 minute stand-up serves as a major interruption. I see it as a way to consolidate some of the tiny interruptions throughout the day into one.
Also teams have individuals of varying experience so we consider the stories to be a team goal. This makes the more experienced individual more willing to help those still learning since they are no longer making a trade-off for their own stories vs somebody else.
Lastly, I've worked on projects from 1-20 people and beyond a certain size, daily meetings are just mandatory or things fall apart. In a previous project, I ran these big daily status meetings and they tended to run long. Everyone hated it so I dropped it for a few days but then the code started breaking due to lack of communications. We decided to split the meeting into smaller groups and they ran quicker and there were less complaints. However we were still able to keep the code quality.
But I think the most important things is "one size doesn't fit all." If something is not working, have an open discussion within the team and suggest some alternatives. If there is no avenue to give feedback, that is the fundamental problem.
> We let them choose the time of the day for the daily stand-up.
Small anecdote about choosing stand-up time: We previously had stand-up at 9:15am, but management wasn't happy that we would all immediately after go for coffee (taking around 10-20 minutes). So standups were moved to 9:45 on the condition that we would get coffee 'before work'. Instead what happened was that people wouldn't get into work until 9:43am and everyone still went for coffee after standup.
Interesting language. "We let them" sets of an alarm for me. Why do they need to be allowed to the choose time of day? Are they not self-organizing? Or is this organization still in the midst of transformation?
Yes we are in the midst of a transformation and most people are new to this. And those with previous experience with scrum teams had lots of bad experiences elsewhere (hour long stand-up meetings and inconvenient times, etc.)
We let them choose the time of the day for the daily stand-up. One team agreed on 11am. Another on 5pm. Some people see this 15 minute stand-up serves as a major interruption. I see it as a way to consolidate some of the tiny interruptions throughout the day into one.
Also teams have individuals of varying experience so we consider the stories to be a team goal. This makes the more experienced individual more willing to help those still learning since they are no longer making a trade-off for their own stories vs somebody else.
Lastly, I've worked on projects from 1-20 people and beyond a certain size, daily meetings are just mandatory or things fall apart. In a previous project, I ran these big daily status meetings and they tended to run long. Everyone hated it so I dropped it for a few days but then the code started breaking due to lack of communications. We decided to split the meeting into smaller groups and they ran quicker and there were less complaints. However we were still able to keep the code quality.
But I think the most important things is "one size doesn't fit all." If something is not working, have an open discussion within the team and suggest some alternatives. If there is no avenue to give feedback, that is the fundamental problem.