Scrum Potato: Orchestrating a Daily Stand-up

While it is ideal to have team members co-located in a single office, floor, or room. If you happen to have team members in different locations throughout the country or world, you might find a challenge when running a daily stand-up. Sometimes the meeting becomes a bit silly with people talking over each other, dead air where people aren't sure who should go next, or someone orchestrates the sequence of the speakers.

Being a ScrumMaster, one way to help facilitate this meeting is to play ScrumPotato. Based on the game Hot Potato, the method is simple:

1. ScrumMaster starts it off by asking someone to start.
2. That person shares the necessary information for the Daily Stand-Up. When complete, that person chooses who to pass to next.
3. Repeat until all team members have taken a turn.

Some benefits to this include:

1. Its different. Sometimes, it is good to change things up to keep things interesting. Of course, if this is too distracting and the meeting is actually worse, please revisit what you're doing.
2. Encourages better listening. Since the order is unknown, through observation, team members tend to listen better using this model. Being in different locations and not always having visual contact with everyone, listening is a huge factor.
3. Encourages better preparation. Just like in the game version of Hot Potato, ScrumPotato tends to have people more prepared and keeps them on point.

Please give this a shot and share any feedback on how this benefits your team or how you modified this to better fit your needs.

If your team is all standing in one room, it might be fun to actually have a small object or chainsaw to pass around. This helps with the eye contact.

Enjoy.