Daily Standup

You might be thinking to yourself at this point, that's a lot of heady kind of deep thinking concepts, Mike. It's a lot of information. And you're right, it is that mindset. These things take years to build. And so we get this focus on mindset is a lot to take in. But you know, a lot of people sort of come to Agile and say, how do you buy this? How do you install this? What's the Agile process that we could just put in? And while there are processes, and I mentioned this before, it's really a mindset that has to come first. It's very common for organizations to look to a set of tools or techniques to be the Agile solution, but there isn't that, there isn't the Agile solution. It's a mindset, an approach to how we work. And you know what, it's achieved by both being agile and, and doing agile. It's sort of like built on the values and the way agilists think, the things that agilists value. So for example, and I don't know where you're at, but do you value relentless improvement as an approach to work? Do you believe that improving daily work is more important than doing daily work? Do you value continually exploring, continually discovering and learning new things? Do you value collaboration with customers, with users, with individuals? Do you value failure, the knowledge gained from failure? But do you value failing early and learning? It's important to understand that this mindset is comprised of these actual components, these practices, these approaches, this thinking that we use as agilists and the relationship between this mindset and the principles that we've talked about is, and applying to the practices which we'll introduce in the coming chapters and how those things match together. And just a sort of preview of some of those Agile practices. Let's, let's take some examples. The daily standup. This is a very common team level event. It's for the team to know if the team's going to meet the team's commitments. We call it the daily stand up. Well, because they should meet daily. But when I meet with teams and I ask them, you know, are you meeting daily? They say no. I might ask, well, what is the purpose of the daily standup? I'm checking their mindset. What's the purpose? And if they can say, well, it's for the teams to know if we're going to meet our team's commitments, I'd say, great. So how do you manage that if you're not meeting daily? They might have a wonderful answer. Maybe they're co located or they use some online real time communication tool, whatever it is, and they're able to meet their commitments, then they're sort of fulfilling the mindset. They know what they're trying to do and that's great. Another example, let's, let's take like backlog refinement. And we'll again, we'll talk more about this later. But it's preparing the work, getting ready for the upcoming sprint or iteration and some people might have that as a formal meeting. You know, like Tuesday at 3 o' clock we do backlog refinement. Do you have to do that in a meeting every Tuesday at 3:00'? Clock? No, you don't have to. That's a great way to do it, but you don't have to do it that way. As long as you're meeting and fulfilling the mindset behind how you're preparing work and having a well refined list of work or backlog, then that's what matters. That's an important piece, it's an agile piece. And how you do that is going to vary. It's about your mindset. Do you know about how to apply practices because of the mindset? How are you getting fast feedback? How is your work organized? Are your teams cross functional? Those are the things that we think about as agilists, those are the mindset and practices that we bring as agilists. And so we get it. It's a sort of a heady construct. And in the coming chapters we're going to give you some real hands, practices and techniques and tools. But it's important to be able to tie those two things together.