2. A daily huddle is as the same as a standup meeting or a daily scrum aimed to
keep team members updated and prepared for their next action, clear priorities for
the day and armed with the tools they need to get it done.
What makes a powerful daily huddle?
People and their efforts do. Here you may check out 10 tips (perhaps trivial but
somehow effective and proven) for running a great daily huddle meeting.
3. Clear goals
The key goal that all team members should set during the daily huddle meeting is to improve
communication flow through faster and transparent feedback. 24/7 feedback model will increase
project velocity and enable the team to make quick adjustments to keep the project running
smoothly. Right goals and objectives are the secrets for the effective daily huddle.
Topics for discussion
What should be discussed during your daily huddle? The relevant topics should include the play to
run and who will be running it. The crucial point here is to timely define what task is on the critical
path and who will do it. You should also identify if there is anything blocking the work. Remember
that the daily huddle is not a status meeting or a meeting for in-depth technical discussions.
4. The cadence of the meeting
The key timing recommendation for conducting the daily standup or daily huddle is
15 minutes, not more. It's better to arrange it every 24 hours. There are teams that
arrange such meetings three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday).
However, it can influence project velocity as teams miss out on fast feedback.
Time and space
It may seem easy, but reserving a meeting room, finding a time for discussion,
relocating and setting a computer or a wall projector take some time. In the ideal
world, you'll have a regularly scheduled meeting time and a dedicated room for
this action.
5. Personal speech
What should you actually say? It always depends on what your team needs. Do not forget that the
purpose of the team huddle is to check-in with your team members. Be short and crisp. The ideas
of what to share during the huddle may be as following:
• What was accomplished yesterday?
• Top priorities for the current.
• Personal project wins.
• Reviewing the core metrics.
• Sharing roadblocks that you need assistance in.
• Customers updates, etc.
6. Reprioritization
It's not a secret that often team members feel overwhelmed with work from
competing projects. One more obvious benefit from any daily meeting is about
ensuring priorities and shifting current work.
Individuals may be working on the wrong thing and critical tasks may get
unnecessarily delayed. Clear prioritization is the way to optimize it. Ensure team
members’ priorities are correct and check if they are not overloaded with the
simple methods and product management tools or dive deeply into the popular
complex methodologies for working with priorities.
7. The sense of urgency
It's important to practice a sense of urgency so participants do not get off track.
That's why a daily huddle should be about 15 minutes or less. The meeting should
be on point, effective and not boring. All team members should feel energized.
Daily huddles and weekly planning
Your daily huddle meeting will perform better if combine it with weekly planning.
Weekly planning is when you take a slightly longer distance view to be better
prepared for threats.
8. The art of visualization
Many of us are used to wall and boards with colorful pens for visualization tasks,
plans, and other agenda stuff. Often teams that use simple physical boards do not
have a complete picture of how their tasks fit into the overall plan and the strategy.
They can not identify details in context of the schedule.
In this case, such friendly platforms as Hygger.io look pretty helpful. The tools
provide team members with convenient Kanban boards, smart product roadmap,
the backlog priority chart and many more useful features.
9. No distances, only face-to-face meetings!
It's not always possible, but try to meet face-to-face. There are dozens of
researches demonstrating that people communicate more when they are
physically close. These kinds of meetings also create a better sense of
community.
These huddle meetings tips should give a clear picture of the current state of your product and
result in complete optimism. At the very end of each meeting, your team members should be totally
inspired and sincerely state: Ok, team. Let's go make it happen!
