The daily stand-up is broken.
No wonder. It was invented almost 30 years ago and we’re still running it the exact same way.
When dai...
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Arash - thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts.
I think a lot of devs share your thoughts of "that's always the way we've done it". I think what's interesting is the shift to talking about all things through the context of delivery. So the most important thing to talk about is what's preventing that (blockers, dependencies, etc). Framing the conversation this way makes sure that the time is most efficiently spent. Any other conversations about what was done can also be framed this way. For example, here's what I released yesterday and what's progress.
Sascha - this is great!
I think the guiding light of the iteration deadline or sprint goal is a good one. It helps the team take the first step away from a simple "how do I justify my time as an individual contributor" status update and helps focus on "Are we as a team going to deliver".
This shift can also make the standup feel less judgemental/big brother. "We're all in this together, so let's crush it. How can we help each other do that?"
Agree with your point on who attends can derail the meeting and make it a status update. The more senior a person there the less people want to be open about issues for fear of looking bad. The Jira board or whatever tool the team use to track should be up and the developer talking just chooses what to talk about that needs action.
Although worth noting that a stand-up meeting should only be attended by the delivery team, nobody else. It's up to the PM to deliver updates to stakeholders or external interested parties.
A lot of people that dislike the meetings are usually running them wildly incorrect or using them as project update sessions!
Oh I completely agree. In most teams I've been in that's not up to the delivery team. If there are other managers more senior then they just attend or make the meetings what they need them to be, project update sessions.
This is an interesting topic to dive into. Who to invite to the standup. Maybe we'll cover it in the next blog? Stay tuned . . .
Organizations need to encourage their people to question 'why are we doing this?' and ask whether it adds value. If it doesn't add value, why are you doing it? Similarly, the old joke about 'we have x people in this room for an hour, at $y/hour this meeting is costing us (and most likely the client) $x*y - is this meeting worth it?' - this needs to be asked seriously as a sanity check for avoiding unnecessary meetings, or exchanges of info that can be done in seconds via an email or Slack, verses having everyone held hostage in a room for an hour.
15 min standups are more efficient than many other traditional status meetings in the past (if you keep them timeboxed), but if the information being shared is not useful, why do it? If the opportunity for team members to ask for help when they're blocked is the most valuable part of a standup, you don't need the whole team in a room to enable this?
Kevin - exactly. I've have actually done that calculation in my head when in large unnecessary meetings at previous companies.
I think you're right that blockers that are dependencies are better handled through slack. Mostly because you can get things moving sooner.
For technical blockers, I think it is useful to talk about it as a group sometimes. Everyone on the team has a different background and maybe someone has already tackled this. Still possible on Slack, but I think better solutions can sometimes be landed on through conversation.
Have you seen Azure Devops boards? Kind of the same thing. We use them for our stand-up as we have a dashboard with the kanban lanes, plus another swimlane for items the team moved into "blocked" or "waiting".
Focus of the meeting a quick update if you moved something into blocked, quick check of the capacity chart to see if you should still meet assigned tasks, quick look over anything in the "unassigned" column.
All hooks into our Git and TFVC repos and backlog boards and updates in real-time.
Reminds me a lot of Standuphub - standuphub.com/
Good luck with the launch!