👩🏿‍🏫 👜 😂 How to make Daily / Stand-up not look like a status meeting? 🧒🏿 👩🏼‍🤝‍👨🏻 🍲

Although the Daily Scrum or Stand-up meetings are fundamentally different from the reporting meetings, sometimes the former become similar to the latter. To avoid this, let's look at the differences between a good effective Daily / Stand-up and a bad spherical meeting on status in a vacuum, and then we will try to adhere to good practices or avoid bad ones.

	Daily Scrum / StandUp	Status Meeting
Who is it for?	For the development team (DevTeam).	For manager, supervisor, coordinator.
Aim of the meeting	From ScrumGuide: Schedule work for the next 24 hours. To optimize team interaction and productivity by inspecting the work done after the previous Daily meeting and predicting the upcoming Sprint work. Improve communication, eliminate other meetings, identify obstacles to eliminate, encourage quick decision-making, increase the knowledge level of the development team.	Update status, update the actual part of the plan, collect information about lagging tasks and, sometimes, their executors.
Who is responsible for holding the meeting?	Development Team (DevTeam).	Manager, supervisor, coordinator.
Information flow in a meeting	Team members share information with each other.	Participants report to the leader or facilitator (sometimes ScrumMaster becomes such a facilitator - this is bad practice for Daily).
Meeting Start Time	Selected by the team itself.	Determined by the meeting organizer.
Team self-organization	The meeting helps to develop the team's overall responsibility for the result. The team itself determines how to achieve the goal of the sprint - determines the plan. Team members inspect their progress and adapt the plan.	No self-organization - participants simply share the current situation with the host of the meeting. The team does not believe that it can make decisions. The manager can challenge decisions and indicate what and how to do.
Commitment (commitment, promise)	Team members are committed to each other.	The promise is "somewhere out there" to the boss, customer, seller.
Transparency	The meeting increases transparency - everyone in the team knows what is happening, what others are doing, and in accordance with this understanding adapts their plan for the day. The empirical process helps to cope with complexity and unpredictability.	If the information is reported to someone external to the team, then its members are not completely open - without feeling safe, people are silent about the problems. As a result, the team loses transparency and the ability to adapt. Often the owner of the plan updates the current state of affairs (fact) and is not inclined to significantly adjust the plan for the future or does so with a pronounced disapproval.
Completed work	The team focuses on achieving tangible results, therefore, discusses the challenges that may hinder the achievement of the Sprint Goal. The plan is updated at any time if necessary to achieve the Sprint Goal.	The meeting focuses on updating the current status, for example, “the task is 80% complete”. However, it remains unclear how likely it is that we can provide business value by the end of the sprint.
Cooperation	The owner of the plan is the entire team. The team has a common goal and responsibility for its achievement, therefore they are interested in interaction. Team members know what each of them is focused on. They help each other remove obstacles and do work faster.	Someone outside owns the team plan and coordinates their work.
Phones & Laptops	Usually prohibited.	It can last more than 30 minutes, and many participants are not interested in what others are doing, so telephones are allowed. This, in turn, reduces the level of cooperation.
Meeting minutes	Usually not held, because this meeting is an opportunity for the team to self-organize in achieving the overall Sprint Goal. Otherwise, the team feels increased control and micro-management, and motivation falls.	The protocol is necessary to fix the agreements and track the implementation of sub-tasks that are not reflected in the main plan.
Losses	There is no time loss or they are minimal - “the meeting is limited to 15 minutes”.	Usually the meeting itself lasts 30 minutes or more, the minutes of the meeting are fixed, then it is drawn up and sent by mail.

Of course, for clarity of comparison, we took a good correct Daily / Stand-up on the one hand and a “typical” reporting-status meeting on the other. In reality, both the first and second have characteristics of each other. Analyze your current meetings, determine which elements should be removed, changed, added, and gradually, step by step, improve these meetings and the interaction as a whole.

How to make Daily / Stand-up not look like a status meeting?

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