SCRUM - non cooperative team members [closed]

Question

What do you do if members of your team are not cooperative during scrum meetings? They either provide a very high level definition of what they are currently working on, ("working on feature x"), or go into extremely irrelevant details, in spite of being well educated in SCRUM methodology. This causes the scrum meeting to be ineffective and boring.

As a scrum master, what are your techniques to getting the best out of people during the meeting?

Edited to add:

What technique do you use to stop someone who is talking too much, without being offensive?

What technique do you use to encourage someone to provide a more detailed answer?

How do you react when you find yourself being the only one who listens, while other team members just sit there and maybe even fall asleep?

Answer 1

First of all... make sure folks are standing up... and not even leaning on the wall or a desk.

At a high level, I would say that, whenever you face issues on the team, the best response is to ask the team for solutions. However, here are some of the techniques I've used for the issues you're facing.

Talks too much

• have him/her stand on one leg
• have him/her hold the scrum "speaking" token in an outstretched hand while they speak.
• Add a flip chart to the scrum to list tabled issues... when someone gets longwinded on a topic that is not scrum-meeting-worthy, interrupt and say "Hey - great point. I'm not sure everyone needs to discuss this, how 'bout if we park this for a follow-up discussion?" A key to making this successful is to actually follow-up afterwards and get the side conversation scheduled. Alternatively, the speaker may just say "Not necessary... I'll be working with Joe this afternoon on this" or something like that, which accomplishes the goal of reducing the windedness without the need to schedule the follow-up.

Need more detail. Is this for the scrum master's benefit or the team's?

• wait until afterwards to ask the individual more detailed questions. If you think the team also needs to know them, coach the team member by conveying (in your after-scrum questioning) that "this is the sort of thing that I think Joe Smith would be helped in hearing from you, what do you think?"

Team doesn't listen.

• Ask them on an individual basis. "Sally, I noticed that you don't seem to be getting much out of the Scrum. How can we adjust it to make it valuable for you?".
• Post questions to others during the scrum. Like if Sally says "I integrated with Bob's code yesterday", ask Bob "how'd that go?" (I'd use this sparingly... to guard against scrums taking too long).
• I've found that sometimes team members tend towards old habits by looking at the scrum master or project manager when they speak. When this happens alot, I alter my gaze to look away, which almost forces the speaker to gain eye contact with other members of the team, which may help the other members of the team to pay attention.