Why Every Scrum Master Needs a Daily Checklist
However mundane, daily checklists actually promote higher performance
Working under more senior scrum masters, I met exceptional ones who continue to rise to the occasion and actually inspire their team(s) to innovative, solutions-oriented thinking that drives immediate results. These elite scrum masters I’ve observed share one common practice that I’ve used to minimize mistakes and oversights in my day-to-day interactions with my teams:
Adhering to a simple checklist.
Inspired by reading “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” (authored by general surgeon Atul Gawande), I decided to write this post. Toward the end, I added a sample checklist I followed daily that I hope will inspire others (so, keep reading).
From the book, Gawande’s points are:
Despite how complicated, complex or super-specialized a process is, breaking it into simple steps via a checklist will help you minimize critical mistakes.
No matter how mundane and commonplace the task, if it’s essential, you should record it.
A checklist is a series of interconnected tasks that together achieve your actual goal.
Checklists instill discipline and higher performance.
Starting out, I observed and worked alongside vastly more experienced scrum masters. The great ones stuck to a routine and had either mental or physical checklists. Even their arrival times to work and scheduled breaks were carefully coordinated based on what projects at hand the team was working on.
Their simple checklists accomplished a few key things:
It set a cadence for the scrum master and the team. The scrum master, by setting a daily cadence for themselves, inadvertently drove the team to have a daily working routine. This set in calmness and working order, even under duress from management.
Priorities from the day before never got overlooked. The scrum master would follow up with key SMEs and project status independently, ensuring no loose ends or missed deadlines.
The scrum master was able to delegate more easily. Because they could move through their day with a simplified agenda, the scrum master had more capacity to deal with a fire or a new project that came up. The scrum master would apply the same checklist philosophy to any given situation.
A checklist keeps you grounded, organized, and helps you avoid a reactive “fight or flight” response.
At some points in my career, I ran as many as five teams dispersed across the world. Here was my checklist when I worked with Ford Motor Company:
Daily 5-10 minute call with India team leads at 7 am. I would do an abbreviated stand up with leads to see if we addressed their concerns between now and yesterday, so I could bring their concerns to my US and Canada teams to get them technical support during their next-day working hours.
Same call with Germany team, but full stand up format since the project was more complex.
Slack coffee chat with my international test team (China, Poland) before 8 am, to discuss how manual/automated testing is going and if they have hardware/software support to carry out testing.
Update shared Confluence and JIRA tasks with updates from global teams so management and stateside teams are aware of potential blockers by the time they arrive. Send emails/Teams channel convos with these updates.
Slack coffee chat with some of my devs independently before stand ups at 9:30 am to check if they received technical support (senior dev help, test help, HW support) on given tasks. I’d also review test plans and test results. This was reserved for high priority, critical tasks.
Updated shared Confluence and JIRA tasks with comments for team/management awareness. Send emails/Teams channel convos with these updates.
After stand ups, do daily check in with team members who expressed lack of support or were stalled on tasks to strategize a new plan of action (is it estimated time, lack of support, inaccurate specs, product owner direction, or some combination was usually the issue).
Check over retrospective concerns and monitor by priority and due date, if any action needs to be taken (no easy feat with five teams).
In daily afternoon call with management, bring up Confluence/JIRA updates and new “game plans” needed to reorg project deliverables.
I did a whole lot of firefighting and meetings of course, outside of the above list. But the point I’m trying to make is though this list seems mundane, it helped me stay sane running so many globally distributed teams. The checklist would help me and others catch showstoppers that would definitely hold up production and cost the company lots of $$$ to the ire of senior management.
Further, organizing my day this way helped me ensure that none of my teams’ needs were being neglected, which is just as important as everything else.