How to Handle Outsiders at the Daily Scrum

I always like to think of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showing up at a daily scrum for a team on which I’m the ScrumMaster.

I’ve never met Mr. Ballmer, so all I know of him is from his public reputation. He was known for yelling at his employees. He once slipped a malware-infected floppy disc in an IBM computer at COMDEX so that OS/2 would crash during a demo.

And then there’s that "Developers! Developers! Developers!" video.

Yet, conventional Scrum advice is that when Steve Ballmer shows up at my team’s daily scrum, I’m supposed to tell him he’s just a chicken, and not committed to the sprint. And then I’m supposed to tell him to be quiet.

Not me, brothers and sisters! You may have the guts to tell Steve Ballmer to shut up. I don’t.

But what I would have the courage to do is to thank Mr. Ballmer for attending, tell him the team is going to quickly run through their agenda for the meeting in no more than 15 minutes, and tell him we’d be happy to answer questions from him after that.

While this may not work with Steve Ballmer, I’ve found it to work extremely well with other outsiders who attend a daily scrum.

I usually conclude the normal part of the daily scrum with something like, “Thanks, everyone. We’re done with the scheduled part of the meeting.”

And then I’ll thank any outsiders for their patience as we conducted our meeting, and ask them if they have anything they’d like to add or if they have any questions.

About half the time, the outsider has nothing to add or ask. They were either there to observe or their question was answered by what was already said.

While we do want to keep the daily scrum as a team meeting, we don’t want to be disrespectful to outsiders who may occasionally attend.

Quite seriously, if Steve Ballmer did choose to attend my team’s daily scrum, I’d be honored and proud that our team and its project meant that much to him. I would never want to ruin any goodwill he felt towards that team by telling him to **"be quiet during our meeting." **

If any outsider attends what you might consider too frequently, consider having a private conversation with that person. Do this especially if the outsider is a manager of one or more team members.

An outside manager needs to understand that although it’s acceptable to observe a daily scrum, the team is almost certainly less open when the manager attends. And as a team’s Scrum Master, I don’t want people hesitating (even slightly) to bring up issues.

A good Scrum team is moving too fast to be successful with anything but complete honesty and transparency.

And keeping your team’s daily scrum to be just for the team, but treating outsiders with respect and allowing them to comment or ask questions afterwards will help your team succeed with agile.