09:00 A.M. to 09:15 A.M. – team huddle

Notice that I've not called this a scrum-something that we will discuss at the end of this chapter-which was a deliberate effort not to label this short meeting as a strictly software development practice. This fact is especially important if your team is multi-disciplined and includes non-developers.

However, both the idea and end goal of the team huddle are very similar to those of a scrum. Ultimately, you want your team to work in a self-organizing manner. If your remit is slightly different, in that your team has chosen to follow the Waterfall instead of Agile model, then using a simple huddle format to get organized tends to work well. This is especially true for less mature teams.

The rules of a team huddle are simple:

• Everyone speaks and shares for a maximum of 2 minutes per person.
• No interruptions are allowed, and all questions are asked at the very end.
• There's an overall duration of 15 minutes for the entire huddle.

Each team member should provide three pieces of information, all in relation to helping the team to achieve the sprint goal. Teams at Atlassian, the global software giant, have dynamic stand-ups and use these three simple questions:

• What did I achieve last Friday?
• What will I achieve/do today?
• What do I need help with?

In the process of establishing this meeting, you will most probably need to, at least at the very start, lead it. Leading it doesn't just involve arranging an appropriate open space or meeting room for the huddle to occur; it can go as far as physically getting everyone to attend and ensuring that everyone follows the rules that we just mentioned.

As the team gets more familiar with this way of working, and they begin to see the positive impact that the huddles are having, then a positive step to take is to try and share the responsibility of leading the meeting with every team member. Remember that the end goal is to build a self-organizing team. So, over time, the team huddle should run effectively without any single point of failure.