Don't be afraid to make course corrections

About two years ago, I made a change to our Daily Scrum.  Instead of having each person answer the Three Questions*, I had someone volunteer each day to M.C. the Stand-up and call off the stories that were currently in-progress.  Each person who had worked on the story since the last Scrum then answered the Three Questions in relation to the current story.

This was a Scrum Extension** that was proposed sometime back called the "Feature-focused Daily Scrum" and it seemed like a good idea for mature Scrum teams.  And the truth of it was that for well over a year, this "advanced" format worked very well.

Recently, though, I'd noticed that I was getting less and less input from some of my team members under this format.  Our Scrum was starting to feel stale.  On top of that, the team dynamics had changed significantly and I had some new people who were getting their first real exposure to Scrum.

It was time for a change.

In our Sprint Retrospective I announced that we would be going back to the classic Scrum format where each person answers the Three Questions for all of the work they did since the last Scrum.  This was greeted with some minor support from my developers and, oddly, disdain by my QA personnel.

But this was a Scrum Master decision, not a team decision -- that's the nature of some procedural things in Scrum -- and I asked the team to try the classic format for a Sprint.

And it worked.

Everyone is contributing again and I'm getting more interaction than I got before.  Oddly, the perception of the team is that they are interacting less under the original format, even though the meetings are running about 2-3 minutes longer.  We discussed the change after the trial period at the next retrospective and, for the most part there was enthusiasm for the change.

Scrum requires that you and your teams be brave.  You don't bully, you don't command, but you often have to be brave -- even if it means admitting you were wrong or that the environment has changed and left you behind.  That's Agile.

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* Three Questions: "What have you done since the last Scrum?" "What will you do today?"  "What roadblocks are in your way?"

** Scrum Extensions are a now-maligned idea where Scrum.Org was hosting moderated white-papers on extending Scrum.  This practice has been discontinued in recognition that Scrum should be intentionally simple and incomplete -- a framework that teams fill in with the processes that work for them.