TL;DR: Kanban is neat. So is daily, habitual team-building. Not a ton that hasn't been hashed out before.
Hey, whatever works for you! My team loves planned socializing, but to make it daily would seem like overkill. Some of us would object to spending time unproductively, especially since we already try to streamline our standups.
Are you all working on different projects/features? That's usually a symptom of teams that aren't really teams. They sit together, but work in completely different worlds and do not really need to communicate together.
Teams have a shared goal that they're trying to accomplish together. If you have a team, you are very concerned about what everyone else is working on and struggling with since it will affect where you can help and what you should be working on.
That's why Agile teams are small teams. If you're team is too large then you'll end up fragmenting and forming sub teams and not caring what the others are working on since it won't affect you.
In my experience, daily stand-up meetings work best when:
-The team is new, or starting on a new project.
-The product is approaching a big deadline.
With the former, it helps the team build momentum early-on if there is a chance to sync-up and trade knowledge every day. With the latter, it pays to do a daily triage of new issues and re-evaluate existing priorities, so that there are no last-minute surprises.
Generally, when the team is working in full swing, daily meetings become less productive. One way of mitigating this is to just be aware of this fact and keep the meetings as short as possible. Stand-up is not the time to evaluate each member's performance, so nobody should feel pressured to explain everything they are working on in detail. A general overview should suffice (one or two bullet points), with clarifications should anyone need to know more.
I've also seen these meetings used as a way for people to "prove" that they have been working.
The main problem I have with mandatory meetings is that they often impair one's ability to get work done. Some people work best when uninterrupted by a meeting. Some people work best when they get an entire morning without interruption. These meetings seem to be mostly sitting waiting for the last person to arrive, or for the cat wrangler to get started with proceedings.
Remember, it's more important to build the right thing than it is to build lots of stuff.
It's better to have the daily stand-up, interrupt your productivity a little bit and discover what you're working on shouldn't be worked on at all, than it is to work for days on something only to have to throw it out and start all over again because you didn't know that something changed.
Far too many organizations focus too much on individual productivity and far too little on delivering things that are actually valuable to their customers.
That's not to say individuals shouldn't be productive, just that writing code all the time doesn't necessarily mean you will be successful as a business.
If the start time is a problem, bring it up at your retrospective and see how the rest of the team feels about it.
I've watched a lot of teams do standups. Very interesting to see how different folks handle it.
One thing that strikes me as unusual is that the benefit of the stand-up is not always visible to those participating in it! So I'll see people with lots of Scrum or Agile experience say "We're a mature team. We don't need no stinking stand-up" -- then make a bone-headed mistake that would have been caught by simply talking more to each other.
Maybe my sample size is small (100-200 teams), but to me stand-ups are like brushing your teeth: you don't want to take all day with it, it doesn't really seem to do much while you're doing it, and it pays off in a big way over time.
As I mentioned in another comment, they likely forgot the purpose of the daily stand-up, which is to have everyone be on the same page everyday. If they're doing that without a daily stand-up, then fine, but it's usually quite difficult to do in teams larger than 2-3 people, which may explain why they lost the value when they stopped doing it.
It's not hard to do the daily stand-up and there can be many ways to make it more of a team building experience. I use Improv with the teams I work with (see: http://ow.ly/dOmJJ)
Step 1 says to brew tea and shows people sitting down. In most cases, this to me is a stand-up antipattern. The reason it's called a "stand-up" is because everyone does actually stand up, which encourages everyone to make it finish as quickly as possible.
Sitting down and brewing tea might work for people well versed in agile, but for most places "doing agile", it smells of Agile Theatre.
Standup meeting: Do a quick daily check, offline any conversations that need to happen between individuals, and get on with the job.
I absolutely agree that the "slowing down" and tea ritual in front of the stand-up can potential be dangerous for speed and terseness if you aren't conscious about keeping the meeting to the point.
I can understand how it might sound controversial in the blog post. That said it worked great for us to have it in place as a buffer before the actual meeting. I've seen teams that were very disciplined in being prepared that didn't need an explicit buffer for getting into the moment or being on time before the meeting. Our "Stand-Ups" definitely got more focused and fluent since we have it in place. Definitely sounds counter-intuitive :)
Hi Tosh, that's good it's working. Agile is definitely about being pragmatic and doing what works for you...I'm really just talking about the default position as I've worked with people who assume this is the standard agile way to do a standup. It doesn't apply in your case.
That's why I say this can work for people well versed in agile.
In my experience, most people practicing agile aren't well-versed in it and would benefit from applying it to the letter first, then modifying it to their needs.
"If it works for them then they're doing "Agile" perfectly." is a very dangerous statement. By that logic than doing anything is doing Agile and we know this is not true. If it were true, you could do waterfall and if that works for you, then it's Agile. Which is just silly.
This is not to say that the stand-up must be exactly as described in Scrum or elsewhere, but the key is that you have the Agile mindset and understand why you're doing the thing you're doing.
For example, the stand-up is a short and focused meeting where teams co-ordinate and get on the same page (which means it's NOT a status meeting).
We stand to keep the meeting short and focused. If you keep the meeting short and focused, then it doesn't matter if you're standing or sitting. Far too often, teams choose not to stand, lose sight of keeping the meeting short and focused, and transition to having long, boring, status meetings that aren't very useful.
If you choose to have tea before your stand-up, then have a short and focused meeting where everyone gets on the same page, then you're fine. If you're having wandering conversations that go nowhere or on wild tangents and never really seem to accomplish much of anything, then you've probably missed the point.
I have a video course dedicated entirely to the daily stand-up, good and bad habits, and how you can use Improv to get everyone focused, energized, and listening before the meeting. You can check it out here: http://ow.ly/dOmJJ
Some people are older and have old injuries, standing in one place is agonizing. Some are in wheel chairs. Standing is an anti-pattern to the mostly shy, quiet nature of techies in the first place. Standing for a meeting sounds like something thought up by someone in perfect health and probably an extrovert, marketer who thought he/she was a coder.
Moving on with the analysis, Agile with an uppercase A is an anti-pattern to how humans live and work in the first place. The idea of sprinting makes sense when you're within reach of the goal; not for the entire cycle of development unless what is being developed only takes 3 weeks from the start to the finish.
People who have injuries or are otherwise unable to stand can certainly sit. The point of standing however is specifically because it gets uncomfortable when you do it for too long. This prevent standups from turning into 30 minute or longer meetings.
That would certainly be something to bring up with your team if you do regular retrospectives.
The purpose of standing is to keep the meeting short and focused. Can you think of alternative ways that your team can ensure that the meeting is short and focused that doesn't require standing? If so, suggest them (or see what your team members suggest) and try them out!
I think you are missing the point that I'm making which is quite simple. Requiring people to stand up is a discriminatory practice and that puts companies at significant legal risk.
Recommendation? We sit and the meetings are short or long or don't happen at all on an as needed basis.
Don't force your cure on those of us who do not have your ill.
Moving on with the analysis, Agile with an uppercase A is an anti-pattern to how humans live and work in the first place. The idea of sprinting makes sense when you're within reach of the goal
1) Agile != Scrum. Sprints are just a Scrum term not a general term in the agile community.
2) Many Scrum folk I talk to think sprint was a poor word choice (it wasn't intended to be taken as "as fast as possible" but "something with a defined end" - many short sprints rather than one long marathon). Many use the more neutral "iteration".
3) Not going as fast as possible and having a long term sustainable pace is what agile projects are all about. That's why you saw practices like "Sustainable Pace" in XP http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/overtime.html
You stand up to get folks out of their typical environment (cube, conference room) and to get their ears open. The point isn't to stand in an upright position, it's to communicate.
At a company I worked for a few years ago, we did "stand up" type meetings in a park across the street, or on a balcony. We were mostly sitting down.
Only do your standups 4 days a week. That way you get a weekly reminder of what you miss when you don't do daily standups and a weekly reminder of what you're giving up to do them.
I really think that it helps keep things moving faster on the 4 days that we do the standups. Our workplace has no-standup Mondays and work-from-home Fridays (with a telephone standup). I recommend both practices.
I love this idea. It seems to relate to the idea of enabling yourselves to fail fast and often. I'm adding this to my tool box for when a need arises. Thanks!
great tip. Haven't thought about that yet. It sounds like a brilliant concept for reality-checking the value of the Stand-Up and winning buy-in from people who (rightfully) question the benefit of doing Stand-Ups in comparison to what you give up (n minutes * participants). I'll definitely keep this in mind for the future.
Exactly what I hoped for when writing the blog post, I'm learning so much right now just by hearing insights from people like you.
I would have thought Monday was just the day you would want a standup to load everything back into your head from the weekend. Do you have a better way to do that?
I would have thought it would work out better if you took Friday off. That way you don't have to deal with a stand-up over the telephone. Stand-ups over the phone are often extremely painful and nowhere near as useful.
Hey Guys, Completley off topic but I really like your product. One thing I think you can improve on your home page is you have a-lot of images but none of them are clickable to maximize/get more details. Think you could make your homepage more interactive check out the simple.com homepage for an idea of what I mean. Hope you find this feedback helpful. :)
thanks a lot for the recommendation. Definitely very helpful feedback. We're currently retinafying the public pages and the app itself, landing page overhaul is coming.
Communicating about the look and feel of our product is a thing that we definitely can do better on and I also observe many other technical-founder teams not spending enough time on. Probably because you see your product every day and know it inside out.
Thanks for the heads-up and the simple.com example!
This was a relevant post regarding any meeting for a tight-knit team with a focused objective. Which is to say, the one undeniable benefit is uninterrupted, distraction-free communication.
That said, if you're a resource to multiple teams/projects, many meetings just seem to become a sick joke where you talk about everything and do nothing.
P.S. I'm probably just being cynical, but I dislike when I can't tell where the helpfulness stops and the PR starts in these type of posts (company with stake in topic.) No disrespect intended to the OP...
thanks a lot for chiming in. I don't think you're cynical. I try to write about useful stuff but of course producing content is a form of content marketing.
That said I try to be conscious about not being spammy and I think there is a way to pull it off :) Any feedback highly appreciated. I plan to write much more in the future and definitely don't want to come across spammy.
My team is split up across two locations with 9 people in one office and two in another. How have people handled remote standups? Do you get the remote guys on speaker phone? Have a separate meeting with them? Are there any tips/suggestions for making standups with remote employees work well?
My team consists of four people, two of which are remote, spread across three adjacent timezones. We find that a regular three-way conference call is sufficient. This arrangement has worked well for three years.
The idea of using Skype has surfaced once or twice but we've gotten by without it. I doubt we'll ever need it.
As for advice…
* I would suggest everyone place their call from a suitably quiet room. Someone doing dishes, making tea, or wrestling with a dog is extremely distracting.
* Hold the standup meeting on time and don't delay more than five minutes. If you don't, you're effectively chaining people to their phones for an indefinite amount of time.
* Two or more people in a room together should remember to speak to the phone and not each other. It's amazing how much of a statement or conversation can be lost over the phone when co-located people use gestures and glances to communicate.
39 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 98.3 ms ] threadHey, whatever works for you! My team loves planned socializing, but to make it daily would seem like overkill. Some of us would object to spending time unproductively, especially since we already try to streamline our standups.
I have used stand-ups in the past, but found there was a lot of information being shared that not everyone cared about or benefited from knowing.
I like the idea of keeping everyone up to date about what's going on, but I am not sure stand-up meetings are the solution.
I would never run around an office interrupting peoples work just to make them attend a usually pointless "stand-up"
It seems like a lot of chest thumping to me.
I told manager that at the daily stand-up meeting, people just say - what I did yesterday - what I am doing currently
Most of the time, each one of us does not care about what other people did yesterday or is doing what today.
Only manager care.
Though manager get pissed off I still do not want waste my time on it.
It also sounds like you may not have a team either. A group of people sitting together working on tasks unrelated to each other do not make a team.
Teams have a shared goal that they're trying to accomplish together. If you have a team, you are very concerned about what everyone else is working on and struggling with since it will affect where you can help and what you should be working on.
That's why Agile teams are small teams. If you're team is too large then you'll end up fragmenting and forming sub teams and not caring what the others are working on since it won't affect you.
-The team is new, or starting on a new project.
-The product is approaching a big deadline.
With the former, it helps the team build momentum early-on if there is a chance to sync-up and trade knowledge every day. With the latter, it pays to do a daily triage of new issues and re-evaluate existing priorities, so that there are no last-minute surprises.
Generally, when the team is working in full swing, daily meetings become less productive. One way of mitigating this is to just be aware of this fact and keep the meetings as short as possible. Stand-up is not the time to evaluate each member's performance, so nobody should feel pressured to explain everything they are working on in detail. A general overview should suffice (one or two bullet points), with clarifications should anyone need to know more.
The main problem I have with mandatory meetings is that they often impair one's ability to get work done. Some people work best when uninterrupted by a meeting. Some people work best when they get an entire morning without interruption. These meetings seem to be mostly sitting waiting for the last person to arrive, or for the cat wrangler to get started with proceedings.
It's better to have the daily stand-up, interrupt your productivity a little bit and discover what you're working on shouldn't be worked on at all, than it is to work for days on something only to have to throw it out and start all over again because you didn't know that something changed.
Far too many organizations focus too much on individual productivity and far too little on delivering things that are actually valuable to their customers.
That's not to say individuals shouldn't be productive, just that writing code all the time doesn't necessarily mean you will be successful as a business.
If the start time is a problem, bring it up at your retrospective and see how the rest of the team feels about it.
One thing that strikes me as unusual is that the benefit of the stand-up is not always visible to those participating in it! So I'll see people with lots of Scrum or Agile experience say "We're a mature team. We don't need no stinking stand-up" -- then make a bone-headed mistake that would have been caught by simply talking more to each other.
Maybe my sample size is small (100-200 teams), but to me stand-ups are like brushing your teeth: you don't want to take all day with it, it doesn't really seem to do much while you're doing it, and it pays off in a big way over time.
It's not hard to do the daily stand-up and there can be many ways to make it more of a team building experience. I use Improv with the teams I work with (see: http://ow.ly/dOmJJ)
Sitting down and brewing tea might work for people well versed in agile, but for most places "doing agile", it smells of Agile Theatre.
Standup meeting: Do a quick daily check, offline any conversations that need to happen between individuals, and get on with the job.
I absolutely agree that the "slowing down" and tea ritual in front of the stand-up can potential be dangerous for speed and terseness if you aren't conscious about keeping the meeting to the point.
I can understand how it might sound controversial in the blog post. That said it worked great for us to have it in place as a buffer before the actual meeting. I've seen teams that were very disciplined in being prepared that didn't need an explicit buffer for getting into the moment or being on time before the meeting. Our "Stand-Ups" definitely got more focused and fluent since we have it in place. Definitely sounds counter-intuitive :)
Thanks for sharing your experience!
Ironically, this dogma is what the founders of Agile were trying to avoid.
In my experience, most people practicing agile aren't well-versed in it and would benefit from applying it to the letter first, then modifying it to their needs.
This is not to say that the stand-up must be exactly as described in Scrum or elsewhere, but the key is that you have the Agile mindset and understand why you're doing the thing you're doing.
For example, the stand-up is a short and focused meeting where teams co-ordinate and get on the same page (which means it's NOT a status meeting).
We stand to keep the meeting short and focused. If you keep the meeting short and focused, then it doesn't matter if you're standing or sitting. Far too often, teams choose not to stand, lose sight of keeping the meeting short and focused, and transition to having long, boring, status meetings that aren't very useful.
If you choose to have tea before your stand-up, then have a short and focused meeting where everyone gets on the same page, then you're fine. If you're having wandering conversations that go nowhere or on wild tangents and never really seem to accomplish much of anything, then you've probably missed the point.
I have a video course dedicated entirely to the daily stand-up, good and bad habits, and how you can use Improv to get everyone focused, energized, and listening before the meeting. You can check it out here: http://ow.ly/dOmJJ
Moving on with the analysis, Agile with an uppercase A is an anti-pattern to how humans live and work in the first place. The idea of sprinting makes sense when you're within reach of the goal; not for the entire cycle of development unless what is being developed only takes 3 weeks from the start to the finish.
We need common sense back in the software world.
How do you think that makes us feel?
The purpose of standing is to keep the meeting short and focused. Can you think of alternative ways that your team can ensure that the meeting is short and focused that doesn't require standing? If so, suggest them (or see what your team members suggest) and try them out!
Recommendation? We sit and the meetings are short or long or don't happen at all on an as needed basis.
Don't force your cure on those of us who do not have your ill.
1) Agile != Scrum. Sprints are just a Scrum term not a general term in the agile community.
2) Many Scrum folk I talk to think sprint was a poor word choice (it wasn't intended to be taken as "as fast as possible" but "something with a defined end" - many short sprints rather than one long marathon). Many use the more neutral "iteration".
3) Not going as fast as possible and having a long term sustainable pace is what agile projects are all about. That's why you saw practices like "Sustainable Pace" in XP http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/overtime.html
At a company I worked for a few years ago, we did "stand up" type meetings in a park across the street, or on a balcony. We were mostly sitting down.
Only do your standups 4 days a week. That way you get a weekly reminder of what you miss when you don't do daily standups and a weekly reminder of what you're giving up to do them.
I really think that it helps keep things moving faster on the 4 days that we do the standups. Our workplace has no-standup Mondays and work-from-home Fridays (with a telephone standup). I recommend both practices.
great tip. Haven't thought about that yet. It sounds like a brilliant concept for reality-checking the value of the Stand-Up and winning buy-in from people who (rightfully) question the benefit of doing Stand-Ups in comparison to what you give up (n minutes * participants). I'll definitely keep this in mind for the future.
Exactly what I hoped for when writing the blog post, I'm learning so much right now just by hearing insights from people like you.
thanks a lot for the recommendation. Definitely very helpful feedback. We're currently retinafying the public pages and the app itself, landing page overhaul is coming.
Communicating about the look and feel of our product is a thing that we definitely can do better on and I also observe many other technical-founder teams not spending enough time on. Probably because you see your product every day and know it inside out.
Thanks for the heads-up and the simple.com example!
That said, if you're a resource to multiple teams/projects, many meetings just seem to become a sick joke where you talk about everything and do nothing.
P.S. I'm probably just being cynical, but I dislike when I can't tell where the helpfulness stops and the PR starts in these type of posts (company with stake in topic.) No disrespect intended to the OP...
thanks a lot for chiming in. I don't think you're cynical. I try to write about useful stuff but of course producing content is a form of content marketing.
That said I try to be conscious about not being spammy and I think there is a way to pull it off :) Any feedback highly appreciated. I plan to write much more in the future and definitely don't want to come across spammy.
The idea of using Skype has surfaced once or twice but we've gotten by without it. I doubt we'll ever need it.
As for advice…
* I would suggest everyone place their call from a suitably quiet room. Someone doing dishes, making tea, or wrestling with a dog is extremely distracting.
* Hold the standup meeting on time and don't delay more than five minutes. If you don't, you're effectively chaining people to their phones for an indefinite amount of time.
* Two or more people in a room together should remember to speak to the phone and not each other. It's amazing how much of a statement or conversation can be lost over the phone when co-located people use gestures and glances to communicate.