One of the big movements we hear about is the adoption of Agile processes for managing projects and daily communications.

When you have one project on a white-board – it’s fine, but when you have six or seven projects, the white-board approach just doesn’t work !!

It’s a well-known fact that a lot of time is wasted within organizations during meetings. In order to save time and to increase the level of knowledge transfer and collaboration – many teams, primarily software development teams, are using so called stand-up meetings which is central to most Agile processes.

With faster deliveries, multiple projects and bigger team size it was becoming a challenge for us to get project development status with a team of 150+ engineers and thus to solve this and manage better we started DIPSUM.

DIPSUM – nothing Hi-Fi. Its same what is written in agile books as “daily stand-ups”,  “daily scrum”, “daily huddle” etc. But we prefer to call it DIPSUM (Daily Individual Project Status Update Meeting)

Daily Stand-up —a short meeting where every team member contributes what they are did, what they are about to do, and what issues they have run into. It’s a great way to keep everyone in sync and to build a culture of accountability and information accessibility.

The goal of the DIPSUM is to share meaningful information that involves the team, and that quite likely leads to ACTION.

Few purposes of a daily stand-up include:

• Share commitment
• A daily synchronization between team members, informing team mates of work activities, progress and issues
• Identify obstacles
• Set direction and focus
• A method of cross-checking progress with team mates
• An accountability mechanism that has each team member accountable to other team members for their responsibilities
• A means of dynamically adjusting the work by each team member to accomplish the goal
• Resolving Issues in Realtime
  

Rules which we follow which are very much common and standard to what agile recommends Each team members answers 3 questions in the daily scrum meeting.

1. Yesterday: What did you work on since the last daily stand-up ? Being specific in terms of which work items were worked on.
2. Today: What will you be working on till the next stand-up ?
3. In my way: What obstacles are impeding my progress?

Rules

1. Everyone stands… Except when someone has a physical condition that prevents him/her from doing so. Incentive: Standing burns calories
2. No discussions in the meeting. Each person just provides his/her update. Discussions are to be taken up after the meeting.
3. Time box. The meeting duration is 15 mins… max.
4. Concise crisp updates. Each person should stick to the questions above. Updates should be short and focused on the task at hand.
5. For the team. This meeting is for the team. Everyone on the team should attend.
6. No particular order of people to be followed. Start at a person and go in one direction. No ‘Dev first’ OR ‘QA first’ kind of thing.

PS : Observers are welcome but should not speak or get involved. It disrupts the rhythm the team establishes and takes them off track.

Oh, and be sure to laugh, crack a joke, plan lunch together.

Happy DIPSUM 🙂