Hello,
My team is starting our first Scrum cycle. Daily stand-up meetings are required, as of today.
My question is, what is your time limit on individual speaking in a daily stand-up meeting?
How long should one person speak? Does your team have time limits on daily stand-up speaking?
No strict time limits. As everyone are on their feet, it won't take too much time anyway, it is naturally self-regulated.
We limit the total to 15 minutes.... and a person to between 2 and 3 minutes...if people start discussing design or specifics then those will have to wait till after the meeting or will have to go into a separate meeting with just the people that need to be involved
you can get real creative and introduce the scrum witch..basically a timer that beeps/screams after 2 minutes..then the person's time is up
Each person should answer these questions:
This shouldn't take you more than a few minutes.
Any other discussion should be addressed AFTER the meeting.
The goal of the meeting is to have a general knowledge of what's going on and to communicate impediments.
The key is not letting other topics get in the way, otherwise your productivity could be compromised.
We didn't have strict time limits in any of the SCRUM teams I worked in, but lengthy tirades were often interrupted, sometimes in an ad hoc fashion by anyone who noticed that time is passing, sometimes by the Scrum Master acting as moderator. The latter was more effective :-)
Start with no limits. The people in the meeting are simply stating "I did [x] yesterday. I will do [y] today. I need [z] in order to complete my task(s)." The purpose is NOT to solve the problems and the SCRUM master/moderator should be controlling that flow.
Some people do tend to be a bit long winded and if you run into that, a timer should be used. Start the timer - start talking. Stop talking when either 1. You're done or 2. The timer tells you you're done.
Anyone requiring more time can continue at the end of the meeting if there's time left. The purpose isn't to keep people from talking, but everyone needs the chance to speak AND the meeting doesn't need to become an impediment to productivity.
We have 16 devs in 4 sub-teams of 4 each. The sub-teams group and then speak in series. The first begins speaking at 8:45am sharp. After about 3 releases/9 iterations, we are down and can be back to work, a follow-up meeting or coffee by 9:00.
It did take a few refinements to get it from just under 25 minutes to under 15 consistently.
Things we did address early on:
After a couple iterations, everyone gets into a groove.
This is information in addition to other answers about expected content.
I agree, start with no limits. Every team needs to find its own pace.
Surely more than one won't agree with this, but I've had standups that were in a meeting room, "seated", and up to 5 minutes per person.. this team was a really small team, and the stand up helped not only for the reasons already known, but also to build a "fellowship". In closing, do whatever you need to keep your team comfortable.
Something that it helped at first was asking each team member to fill a shared Google spreadsheet with these columns: [date, finished yesterday, working on, to be finished for the next standup, blocking]. This helped to gain some focus before the meeting, and allowed the team to keep some tracking information.
There is an implicit limit.
So with a team of 10 people (which is already a big team, the ideal team size being 7+/-2), this means ~1mn30 per team member. But even with 10 people, this should be enough to answer the 3 questions:
Any discussion beyond these points should occur outside the meeting, and only with the team members involved into the subject.
Above 10 people, you definitely need to split the team into two teams. For smaller teams, just do the meeting, as long as you stay within the 15mn (and if you don't need the 15mn, that's cool).