First Scrum of Scrums held yesterday

Now that the Development Team has worked with Scrum almost a year—and has proven that it works—other teams have begun experimenting with Scrum, allowing us to slowly by surely scale the management methodology to all levels of our organization. To impose order on the potential chaos multiple simultaneous scrums might bring, yesterday we held our first Scrum of Scrums meeting.

In the daily stand-up meetings, we answer four questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What will you do today?
3. Are TFS times (used to calculate our Sprint Burndown Charts) up to date?
4. Is anything impeding your progress?

In the SOS Meetings, the questions are slightly different:

1. What did your team do since we last met?
2. What will your team do before we meet again?
3. Is anything impeding your team's progress?
4. Will your team do anything to impede the progress of another team?

These questions and answers go quickly and are time-boxed to 15 minutes for the team, however—unlike in the daily stand-ups—we do not stand. The 15-minute segment is a precursor to a longer meeting, therefore the time required for the transition could potentially slow progress more than sitting comfortably for 15 minutes.

These meetings are different from the daily stand-up in other ways, as well. We do not hold them daily. We've started ours at weekly, but we've seen evidence that we will need to move to at least twice weekly—maybe more often.

The final difference has to do with names. We speak of accomplishments and goals in terms of teams—not individuals. This is not because we do not appreciate individual accomplishments. It is because (1) we want to acknowledge that sprints succeed or fail based on teamwork and (2) avoiding individual-level details makes it easier to stay within the 15-minute time-box.

The second portion of the SOS Meeting is for problem solving. It is never time-boxed.

How did our first meeting go? Well... We are just getting our feet wet, so we are fumbling around a bit—but the experts say that is completely normal. I'll be able to tell you more as we get our bearings in the weeks ahead. Rumor has it that we may have even more teams in our SOS by then.