Do you feel out of touch with some of your team members? Do you think that your guys can help each other more, or be more motivated?  Are you making some changes that people need to know about, or under extra pressure?  You might benefit from a daily “scrum” meeting that brings your full team together online.

Any time you bring your full team together, you are spending a lot of time and money, and you are interrupting other work.  It's expensive to you and them.  So, it is important to get through the meeting QUICKLY. That is where the scrum (or stand-up) method helps you. In a scrum meeting, each person stands up and goes through three points in rapid fire:

1. What I did. Now your management reporting is done
2. What I am going to do. Now your planning is done
3. What are my obstacles, and what do I need help with. Discussion starts on this point.

We just released a Scrum tool for Assembla spaces that can help you get through scrum meetings online.

• On the scrum page, a user can fill out the three-point report (it takes about 2 minutes) and see everyone else's report.  This also forms a record of what the team worked on during any given day.
• The scrum tool will send an email alert to team members reminding them about the scrum meeting at a scheduled time.
• The scrum tool links to the chat tool. Pop up chat in a second window, and discuss how you can get around the obstacles.

This type of meeting is also called a “stand-up meeting”, because we try to shorten the meeting by making everyone stand for as long as the meeting goes on. I did them every Monday through the 90's. Why am I promoting the word "Scrum" so soon after complaining about agile jargon? "Scrum" sounds a lot better than “sit-down virtual meeting.” It's fun to say and it reminds me of the days I spent at the bottom of a pile of much larger boys on the rugby field. So, go scrum.

Here's a picture of the tool in action.