Agile improvements: Let's end the confession
A daily meeting of the whole team has become the norm in almost all development teams I’ve been part of in the last couple of years. Before Covid, this usually meant meeting physically in a meeting room while these days, it’s almost always in a virtual conference room.
But no matter the location, the format is always the same: one after another, each team member answers the same questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What am I going to do today?
- Are there any blockers for my work?
My current team was no different - until one retrospective where my colleague Max asked: “Can we please end the confession?!”
This request immediately hit home with me (and still does) because it made so much sense. It was something I had been feeling for quite some time, yet I hadn’t been able to properly articulate it.
What’s the point?
The sad truth was: this classical format hardly helped us as a team to get closer to delivering great results (and I truly believe that our team wasn’t any different from most other teams).
We focused too much on putting people on the spot instead of improving our results.
The fact that we required everyone to lay out what they had done during the previous day and present a plan for the current day forced everyone to come up with a good story. I mean, who would want to give the impression that they didn’t do a whole lot and didn’t have everything under control?
We felt obligated to confess instead of looking for support from our colleagues.
Let’s be honest: who among us hasn’t taken a couple of minutes before the daily and thought, “Well, what can I say later that will make everyone else think that I’ve done something valuable?” I have definitely done this more than once.
Furthermore, the overview of our actual work got lost. We always centered around a person and not a topic, which made it very difficult to actually assess the status of a topic.
Our decision
The request to end the confession was something that resonated with the whole team very deeply, and very quickly we came to the realization that this was indeed something we wanted to change.
So our new daily format looks more like this:
- Walk through all the major topics and check for any news
- Other team-related updates
- Anything else
During the first item on the agenda, we walk through all the open topics and all the stories that are in progress. We ask ourselves what we can do to bring them closer to their resolution, which means making the features available to our users.
People chime in when they need anything, which could be a colleague to clarify something, the name of a stakeholder to contact, or any other piece of information. More than once, the answer to the question “What do we need right now?” is very simple: time. Everything is clear, there are no blockers - we simply need to work on the issue. And that’s perfectly fine. Not every issue needs a ton of additional input.
If the result of our daily is “our machine is working smoothly, nothing special to discuss,” then that’s the best result we can achieve.
The second agenda item is for anything team-related that isn’t directly connected to a feature. A colleague might announce she will be off during the afternoon, a discussion with a stakeholder might have been postponed, or there might be an issue with our test system that we need to take care of.
And finally, the last item on the agenda is anything else that we want to discuss as a team. Often this is some random fact that one of us has heard or simply a joke to keep the team spirit up.
It works!
After switching to the new daily format, we realized very quickly that not only did we have a better overview of the topics we were working on and the things that needed to happen to bring them closer to completion, but we also all felt better. There was no need to confess something each and every day - instead, we could focus on what we all do best: doing great work!
So if you feel that your daily could use some tweaking, then think about ending the confession as well!