It’s all chaos, I know. Company to company, big to small, as long as we have diversified teams we have disorganization and communication break downs; two BIG no-no’s from a management perspective. You know the saying Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus? Well every 8 to 16 working hours a day (depending on your working luxury) programmers are from Atlanta, DC, Florida, and Spain and the rest of your team is spread out across the rest of the world.

It’s 2009 people! And many businesses, regardless of size have picked up, dropped, and picked back up the idea of digital offices. Whether you have hired consultants, outsourced, or just have small teams situated around the US that communicate via Skype, you are spread, and often spread too thin to the point of a communication equivalent to mute whispers. Maybe you’ve heard of a Scrum meeting? Maybe you wish you hadn’t. Scrums are okay, but are they right for your team?

A Zoo of People

I’ve recently come into contact with a new breed of business strategy- disaster. No, it’ s not a new fashion line from Zoolander. Actually, it’s not new at all. But it is resurfacing with a vengeance in tech-based teams.

Reason: the motley crew. A large gamut of highly skilled and not-so-highly-anything technologists that tout training from Ivy League schools to Mom’s basement. You’re dealing with cave dweller code monkeys and brown-nosed techies that figured out they look nice in a suit and can talk to people. Long story long- you’ve got a lot of different people, with varied educational backgrounds, varied training, varied emotional levels, varied experience, varied needs, and varied goals.

Sounds like a normal company, right? Right. So in comes the Scrum. As defined by Wikipedia

“Scrum is an iterative incremental process of software development commonly used with agile software development.”

But weren’t you thinking about the 15 minute, everybody stands up and then we leave meeting? You’re thinking of the daily scrum meeting.

Often time what is introduced to your company as a “Scrum Meeting” is just a piece of the entire Scrum idea, which is based in product development. Not necessarily project management. You are also cutting out entire chunks of the Scrum strategy, including the way the company needs be to shaped into teams, how often and by what means you communicate during the rest of the project, etc.

So the question is: Are daily Scrum meetings still effective if taken completely out of context?

To Scrum or Not to Scrum

This is the decisive answer you were looking for: it depends. Many teams are introducing daily catchups where people spit out status updates, and lay bare their workload. This is okay- and is especially helpful for technical team members, but for Project Managers, Sales staff, etc. one-on-one conversations with other staff members cover more ground where a status update can’t (due to it’s limited nature of the type of communication allowed). It’s important to keep in mind that this setup was for down and dirty teams that are working on the same project. If you have 10 people working on different projects listening to these status updates, it may be a waste of their time.

Make sure, if your team is not as technical, to soften the approach.

• Is a daily meeting necessary? Move the quick catch up meetings to once or twice a week.
• Are you meeting digitally- well the standing up part isn’t really applicable. Let the people sit.
• Change the name of the meeting to something more relevant to your team.
• Keep the meeting tight, but less army-strict in the delivery of updates.
• Encourage follow-up conversations by pairing up individuals at the end of the call to get together

At the end of the day there’s nothing wrong with a quick catch up call. But if you are having a daily Scrum meeting, make sure you know what you are doing and if the Scrum ideaology is right for your company. And if some tech guy brings it in to your group with a suave smile, make sure it’s a relevant tool for your team. So you think you’ll Scrum at your company?