Daily Scrum

One of the principals of scrum is that every sprint delivers something of business value. More often then not, there is a lot of other work that went on in the sprint that cannot be shown because it's not complete. There's a lot of value in letting your stakeholders see what you have got working.

1. The stakeholder benefits from seeing progress in terms of something that actually works.
2. The developer(s) benefit from early and frequent feedback on how well the thing they're building is going to meet the customers needs and can then adjust their course accordingly.
   

I've started a new job recently and I've decided to apply this concept on a daily level. Upon joining any new organization, there are a lot of things to learn. As a knowledge worker, your colleagues are also trying to learn about you. You got through the interview so they know they'd like to work with you but it's difficult to discover a person's strengths and weaknesses until you've had a chance to work with them for a while. As such, I've taken on a small research project that I can focus on in between the huge knowledge dumps. This gives me the opportunity to study some aspect of my new industry in depth and give back some business intelligence to the organization in the process.

Being able to contribute some small thing each day gives me an opportunity to start collaborating with my new teammates and build professional relationships with them. The wizards of scrum will tell you that it scales up well. Apparently, it also scales down with good results.