How to Measure the Effectiveness of a Daily Scrum

This technique is useful for having Scrum teams frequently inspect their execution of the Daily Scrum (also known as the daily stand-up) against a set of established goals. You can read about why I created this technique and the results I got with it here.

1. Establish the Goals Your Team Wants to Achieve

There are some standard goals of the Daily Scrum that every team should be achieving, like inspecting progress toward the Sprint Goal, creating a plan for the day, and identifying impediments. I previously blogged about the goals of the Daily Scrum that I use, which is a good place to start if your team does not already have established goals for the Daily Scrum or if your team is new to Scrum. If your team has been Scrumming for a while, I recommend using a Sprint Retrospective to have the team generate the goals themselves.

2. Make the Goals Tangible

To allow the team to determine whether they achieved a goal, you need to establish what success and failure look like in quantifiable terms. If you are using the goals the I previously mentioned, you can use the following metrics:

Inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal

Achieved: “We checked our progress and compared it to our forecast”
Failed: “We didn’t check to see if we are on pace to meet our forecast”

Plan for today

Achieved: “I have a clear picture of what I am doing today”
Failed: “I am not sure what I am doing today”

Identify impediments

Achieved: “I asked for help when something was slowing my progress”
Failed: “I could use help but did not ask for it”

Make daily forecasts

Achieved: “I told the team what I plan to get done today”
Failed: “I did not tell the team what I will get done today”

Create healthy peer pressure

Achieved: “I addressed things that are taking longer than what my team members said they would”
Failed: “I did not ask why someone did not get something done”

Limit work in progress

Achieved: “We are focused on getting a select number of things done”
Failed: “We are doing too many things at once”

Focus

Achieved: “We discussed what we will do and with whom we will work”
Failed: “We spent more time solving problems than planning for the day”

3. Create a Ginormous Chart

If your team is colocated, find a pad of ginormous stickies and some sharpies. If part of your team works remotely, you’ll have to get creative here.

For each goal, draw a horizontal line and label a 1 on the left and a 5 on the right. Write the goal above the line. Under the 1 on the left side of the line, write the quantifiable measurement for failure that you came up with in step #2. Do the same for the quantifiable measurement for success under the 5 on the right side of the line.

Give each goal a unique identifier. This makes referencing goals easy.

4. Frequently Poll the Team

Here’s what I did to poll the team immediately after the Daily Scrum:

1. I read the goal on which we were voting
2. I counted down from three
3. Each team member held up the number of fingers that indicated their vote
4. I counted up all of the votes and wrote down the total as well as how many people voted
5. I repeated this process until all goals had been voted on

I recommend doing this exercise daily for at least one week. After that, let the team decide what they want to do with it.

After the team gets used to this exercise, it should not take longer than ninety seconds each day.

5. Record the Results

Track the results in a way that is visible to the team. After the polling was over, I cut out seven small labels with the current number of the day of the Sprint on them (I created seven of them because I was measuring seven goals). For each goal, I placed the label on the horizontal line of the ginormous chart to represent the average of the votes for that day.