Daily Cadence
Teams in an agile organization must review the work in progress and the value that is being accumulated and released, taking corrective action if necessary, as early and as often as is practicable. This stops waste from building up and prevents small errors from snowballing into larger ones.Â
A best practice is to hold brief and focused team meetings once per working day. Fifteen minutes is generally recommended. A timebox like this allows teams to plan their work for the day, and to revise any existing plans if needed, such as plans for meeting a Sprint Goal. This daily cadence of reviewing and refocusing allows for minor course adjustments, and it helps to ensure the team meets its delivery responsibilities.
From the Transformation Rollout Team's perspective, the Daily Cadence is also an opportunity to assess...with minimum delay...the rollout of changes drawn from the Transformation Backlog. The Daily Cadence preserves the momentum for agile transformation. It can stop the agile initiative from drifting, or indeed from crashing due to a failure to escape organizational gravity. The Rollout Team should look for evidence that each team has made progress in applying the relevant Transformation Backlog Item, that the acceptance criteria are on course to be met, and that the associated improvements are in an increasingly better position to be leveraged. Even if a Rollout Team is working with a Delivery Team on a full-time basis in order to achieve such results, it is enormously valuable to review progress daily.
Suitable illustrations of daily cadence include timeboxed Daily Scrum meetings and Kanban standups or huddles. When done well, the application of several good agile patterns will be seen at work here, including timeboxing, inspection and adaptation, and teamwork.
Synonyms: Standup, Daily Scrum, Daily Huddle
