“Hey everyone, I'm blocked today. I can't make progress if we don't fix the following issues.”
Most daily scrums are not like that. People usually only say what they worked on yesterday and what are they working today, and this behavior makes more harm than good.
Why people get blocked?
People can get blocked to progress on their work for many reasons like: missing data modelling decision, missing API, missing design, missing understand of requirements, missing someone else approval.
How to be blocked for the Daily?
Most people does not say they are blocked because they did not “prepare” enough to perform the task. Prepare to do a task is all about removing all uncertainty of it. You should ask as many questions as needed to make clear any part of the task. Below are some examples questions:
is the API ready?
does the API supports this new workflow?
does the Design makes sense and fits into the API and product?
do we still need to decide anything? data modelling?
is this what the user really wants and needs it?
do I have all the knowledge to perform this task?
Remote Work and avoiding being 100% blocked
As remote work is becoming the norm on software companies, we need to check if we are going to be blocked before getting blocked, this enable async work unblock us before we got really blocked.
Another trick is to always have another task to do when you current task is blocked for some reason.