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The different types of Daily stand-up for different teams with different maturity; Can product owners and others speak during daily scrum


Daily stand up meeting serves a very important role in agile teams. In a way they are the risk
mitigation meeting. Team members talk about the risk for the iteration and overall product delivery.
The need of a daily stand up for a new team and a matured team is different and hence the need for different rules for different teams. Teams who are starting the agile/scrum journey needs a lot of help. They might be new to agile or might be working together with each other for the first time. A structured well-defined set of rules will help them grow.

For such teams the following rules are more than enough
  1. Daily Scrum Meeting Rules - http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/daily-scrum-meeting-rules.html 
  2. Daily scrum misconception, scrum meeting objectives and different stages of meeting http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/daily-scrum-misconception-scrum-meeting.html

Only team members are “allowed” to speak and scrum master should be present to help the team. This rule immensely helps the new team. I have followed this rule to the dot for the team who were just starting their journey with agile.  But I had different rules for a matured team.

Nothing is constant in agile. The teams without changes and continuous improvement are not agile at all. Nothing can be more anti-agile than seeing agile zealots and checklist cops “following” all rules without understanding any of them.

As the team matures, they need a different set of rules to help them grow to the next level. If the team feels that by allowing product owner or any other “outsider” speak during the daily stand up helps them then they should be allowed to. A matured scrum master or agile coach can recommend this.  When I was the product owner, I gave lot of updates during the daily stand up meeting and it helped both the team and myself.

Product Owner
  • can give update about the product features they are working on
  • provide industry updates or future of product
  • They can provide clarification to any queries from the team
Scrum Master
  • provide update on the progress on the "impediments" he/she is trying to remove
  • provide update on any organizational updates 
  • or anything which interests team members. 
Only thing you have to take care is about the duration of the meeting. Even with these extra updates duration of daily stand up should not exceed 15 minutes.
If Scrum Master, Product Owner or the invited "guest" feels that their updates will take more 1-2 minutes then they could briefly mention that they are going to talk about the "X" topic and people can stay after the daily scrum to listen to it. 

As with everything in agile the idea is to do continuous changes and keep the things which works. May be this works in one team and might not work in others. Adjust your process according to the needs of your team. As the team improves their agile maturity relax the rules so that they can grow further

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