Should your team do Daily Scrum daily?

Scrum Framework suggests that the Development Team sync up everyday for maximum of 15 minutes so that all team members can inspect where they are in achieving the sprint goal and adapt if needed. If the team is not interested in Daily Scrum, they may not be seeing value in it. If that is the case, there could be some underlying issue that needs to be resolved. Here are few reasons people give for skipping Daily Scrum and my thoughts on those:

Team members are busy doing their work so they don’t want to waste their time going to Daily Scrum.
If the team is busily working without sync up when it is needed, they may end up wasting time at the end while integrating their work. I see this in my CSM workshops where each team builds a product. Lot of times they skip Daily Scrum because they are busy building the product. Most of the time they end up having problems like two people working on same task or their work won’t fit together. It is important that team takes few minutes (Max 15 minutes) a day to make sure that they are on track for achieving the sprint goal.

Team is highly collaborative all the time, so why do they need to go to Daily Scrum
It is great if the team is collaborating all the time. Scrum says that the team should sync up at least once everyday. So, if the sync up is happening all the time it is even better. However, it is possible that not the whole team is involved during the collaboration. Daily Scrum gives formal opportunity for all team members to sync up.

There are no dependancies between the items worked on by different members, so no synch up is needed
In this case, every member is working on different items, therefore no collective ownership of the sprint goal. This leads to several problems. If something went wrong towards end of the sprint, the team may not deliver item, since all items are probably in work in progress. Also, if the member who is working on the most important item got stuck, no one else is going to help him/her since they are busy with their work. As per Scrum, the team has the collective responsibility to deliver most important items at the sprint.

Team is geographically distributed, so it’s hard to find a common time for every one be available at the same time
This certainly is a problem since there could be 12 hours time difference. However, the need for sync up doesn’t go away. The team should still find a time that is suitable for everyone and do Daily Scrum. Alternatively, though not ideal, each team could do their own meeting and update the counter part when they are available. Maintaining a dashboard for the team and keeping it up to date could bring whole team to the same page quickly.

It doesn’t matter how the team syncs up, as long as the whole team comes to the common understanding of the sprint progress at least once a day, we are good!

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