What you are saying here is: your standups are poisonous. Ours on a 8 man team only take 10 minutes on average, and we have no team lead. They don't all have to be, if yours are, change them.
Also, instead of fixing the stand up, his solution is to generate a whole bunch of crappy paperwork for the team lead (email, pdf stored somewhere, blah blah).
+1 Our 6 man team takes also 10 minutes the most. Everybody knows from previous work experience how annoying long meetings are. So we really just talk what everybody is going to do roughly for the upcoming week and coordinate if somebody needs to talk to another team-member for a bit longer.
So everybody knows what's going on, but the details are discussed separately.
It seems like in his poisonous meetings there is too much detail for everybody.
It sounds to me like you are doing your standups wrong. The job of the facilitator (in your case, the team leader) should be to keep things moving, and ensure that you aren't taking 30 minutes.
The most important thing to get out of the meeting, IMHO, is challenges, as status should be evident by the location of your story tickets. The problem with providing an environment where "Others can skim-read or ignore." is that they often will, and peer challenges can easily go unresolved without adequate feedback.
You are standing for a reason - its uncomfortable (for those of us who sit all day). Your facilitator should be roping in the conversation (and if not you need to replace them - rotating among team members often works). If that doesn't work, then your teams are likely too large.
I am pretty strongly against micromanagement and process-for-authority's-sake. However, I think Standup is a necessary evil. It sucks. But it just might suck less than the alternative, which is opacity (which gives power to management). Standups deserve some kind of timer, though. One minute per person, and split the standup if it gets beyond 10-15 people. Everyone should also have the right to opt-out.
Here's why Standups can be powerful and, actually, a bit subversive. They create Common Knowledge (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) ) of what you are doing. That's different from shared knowledge. Shared knowledge means everyone knows it. Common knowledge means everyone knows everyone knows it (and, recursively, everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows, and so on...). Bob knows you are getting useful work done. So does Tom, your boss. But, thanks to Standup, Tom also knows that Bob knows you are getting your work done. At least in theory, this limits Tom in his ability to isolate, disempower, disparage and ultimately create cause to fire you. Standups move authority away from managerial hands. They're not intended toward that effect, but if they work well, that is something they accomplish.
(Of course, in a closed-allocation company, your boss can just give you impossible or extremely boring work if he wants to flush you out.)
It also needs to be made clear and constitutional that the daily standup is the only status-reporting overhead, except in a production crisis. If there's Daily Standup and your boss gets to interrupt you regularly with status pings (which is a show of power; he probably won't even remember that he asked you, just like people look at their watches but forget to read the time) then you're just getting screwed.
Also, I agree that standup before 10:00 or after 4:00 is just shitty. I'm usually up at 6:00 am, but the idea that you have to have the same schedule as the boss to be a worthwhile human being is just garbage.
It's not off-topic. To assess whether managerial power exists (and whether it is toxic) one must know that form it will take when it is expressed.
Standup prevents a manager from saying, "This guy isn't getting any work done". In a closed-allocation company, there's nothing to prevent the manager from assigning terrible or impossible work. It's still unilateral firing; it just takes longer.
This guy is seriously suggesting replacing stand-ups with management and paperwork? There's something very wrong here, but that was already clear from the objections.
Seriously, I know that "you're not doing it right" is the standard lame excuse from Scrum-evangelists, but this paints a picture of doing pretty much the opposite of Scrum.
Especially the emphasis placed on the "weekly update" is a big red flag, suggesting this team is doing something that isn't even close to being Agile. Agile and Scrum are supposed to be about delivering working software, and in the case of Scrum it's strictly time boxed. Weekly updates suggest micro-management and/or not delivering anything shippable.
Only the 10:00 versus flex time is a genuine issue. We have a very simple solution for that: if you can't be there, mail it in (or use HipChat). Yes, this also applies to people who start early and are deep in the zone by 10am. It's not supposed to be a two-way conversation anyway, just quickly syncing up.
This is exactly how we do things where I work. We're a pretty big team (about 12) and our standups are finished in 10 to 15 minutes. It's strictly time-boxed and we don't go over.
If you can't make it, we have a phone set up in the middle of the table for people to call in, or you can email someone on the team and they will say your standup for you.
If this works for you it's awesome, congrats. But what I saw in the past (3 different companies) was more like 30m+ standups, because most people (funny enough especially project managers) tend to talk way too much during standups. Unfortunately.
Our team made Take-It-Offline flags that we'd wave whenever someone started going off track during standup. The change was immediate, standup time was cut in half. Now people don't even bring their flags, we just raise our hand or quietly say, "TIO!" Once standup's over, those that had items to TIO stick around and talk about them.
There's your problem. That role is the antithesis of a self organising team. With someone responsible for "managing" that stand up turns into a very expensive way to keep the manager briefed.
In Scrum that's where the Scrum Master comes in. It's their job to facilitate the meeting to ensure that those conversations are continued after the meeting.
A good team will often find ways to achieve these things without requiring the Scrum Master to step in.
Right, and that doesn't surprise me. However, this isn't a problem with standups, but a problem with people not understanding the underlying concepts or just wanting to look good to the team.
The scrum can be any time of the day that's convenient. At my last place we used to do one just before lunchtime. Definitely a good way to keep it short...
After experimenting with a bunch of different times, this is the best we'd found. Late risers have time to get in, people are hungry so it stays short, etc. Just start at noon minus however long you want the meeting to last...
The scrum can be any time of the day that's convenient. At my last place we used to do one just before lunchtime. Definitely a good way to keep it short...
The scrum can be any time of the day that's convenient. At my last place we used to do one just before lunchtime. Definitely a good way to keep it short...
The scrum can be any time of the day that's convenient. At my last place we used to do one just before lunchtime. Definitely a good way to keep it short...
My team right now has around 30 members in the sprint. I've checked with some of the experienced Scrum master in my company, the ideal member is around 4 - 6 person. Even having 7th member's slow things down in his experience. And this is not on just the standups, it applies to daily operations as well.
My take here is that we should have much smaller teams and if possible have Scrum of Scrums to handle bigger project. However, I know that this might not be possible for some since some project tends not to have a good demarcation on what should be in which teams.
Who's dictating 10 o'clock? Standups can be e.g. just before or after lunch, or in the afternoon. The team should be able to agree on a time that works for everyone. And if that really is impossible, then use Skype or similar to include people who are still at home.
A six person team should be able to be done in less than 10 minutes. If someone gets off topic or rants on about details, stop them, and perhaps suggest a meeting afterwords.
You solution totally ruins the dynamics of the standup.
Our Weekdone (http://weekdone.com/) service is meant exactly for what you propose, although more on a weekly paradigm. Many of our users have switched from regular standup meetings to an online weekly process. And even if you do the meetings, distributing plans, progress and problems ahead to the whole team can be a huge timesaver.
We currently have only daily progress input via e-mail at Weekdone, but are looking at providing daily e-mail summaries as well.
Appreciate any input how to make a process like that better in a web/e-mail/mobile service.
In my experience while standups are often tedious and need to be kept short, if someone wishes to stop having them or seeks to avoid them it is a worrying sign for a team player.
If the person in question can't be coached to collaborate with others then a role where they can be a sole contributor may be better.
If you have a six person team and you all speak for half an hour then you are definitely doing it wrong. You should ideally speak for no more than a couple of minutes.
Standups that routinely last longer than 15 minutes need to be corrected. Either split the team, don't have everyone talk every day or find some other way to cut time.
An email is not a terrible substitute if someone is working from home, but part of the value of a standup is that you can quickly ask questions and get answers right there and then.
6 person team * 30 minutes = 180 minutes / 60 = 3 hours
All of this helps if he would have used the common term man hours because 3 hours literally wasn't lost. In my experience the people that make these kinds of claims are the people usually confused about project management, at least for software development, in general.
Unfortunately at larger corporations everything comes down to how many man days a project can fit in a quarter without taking into account the fact that most phases in projects can't fire at the same time due to dependencies.
I actually think Gannt charts model this quite nicely for the higher ups.
A group email to the team asking, "What are you working on today? What are your obstacles?" with a reply-all is actually pretty helpful. Even better, character limits (like less than 300 char) and time limits (like reply by noon).
The best "agile" project I've been on had standups around lunch. The team was geographically scattered so this meant early afternoon for some. Worked fine.
In my experience keeping standups under 15min is the easiest part of the process.
Turning the standup into paperwork seems insane to me.
This is why I moved our standup to Skype. Even if people are away from their computer, you can join a group chat via Skype mobile from the car (handsfree of course). I agree with some of the other points, but if you start to get a good rhythm on how the meeting is run, overages can be minimized. I couldn't imagine not doing this meeting at least as virtual meeting. The last thing I need is to be archiving E-Mails as PDFs.
The standup (in Scrum at least) should be three questions everybody answers: What you did yesterday, what you're doing today, any blockers? This should take a team less than 10 minutes easily.
These meetings are not supposed to generate actions points, or problem solve, or discuss anything. They are merely supposed to make sure everybody knows what's going on.
Follow up specifics later with only the people who need to be involved.
The time of the standup should be set by the team not imposed on them. Consensus is needed.
I can second this. We do a stand up around 11:45, before we head to lunch. We each answer what we're working on that day, bookended by what we did yesterday and/or what we're working on over the next few days.
Any bigger questions which arise get discussed over lunch (sometimes) or in later one-on-ones.
Right, the group I'm in often will have "coordinating members" join as well, from designers, QA, the PM, even the VP will stop by to see whats going on, and sometimes we get 10-15 people. The only times it takes more than 10 minutes are when there are tons of announcements being made.
Most folks just state what they're doing today, and announce significant deliveries. But not everyone has the instinct to keep it short, especially when asked questions.
Doing this takes some minor training. Someone does need to be active in "gently reminding" people to move the debate/discussion somewhere. (This usually takes the form of, "maybe you should meet at X to hash that out in 15".) Whenever there are new people, you have to get them comfortable asking "I'd like to talk to you about XYZ after the standup". A lot of folks are rather timid at first, and often need to get used to it.
To me the author seems to have linear view of productivity; that he seems to think time spent away from the keyboard is wasted time and worse still to waste that time communicating with your colleagues.
IMO the hidden goal of standups is to make sure a development team communicates, ideally face to face. Why? Because it's extremely valuable to shipping quality code / product etc. My experience has always been when standups over-run, the reason is there's some topic that needs discussing and preventing that discussion from taking place is usually a mistake.
Without standups, in a typical office environment with introverted personality types, communication doesn't happen. So in the end they're a compromise; perhaps not the best solution to the problem but good enough.
There's a reason it's called a standup. Take it literally, which I doubt you're doing if meetings are running at 30 minutes.
(Yes yes you don't have to stand if you have a broken leg etc)
Action points aren't supposed to be produced. Standup's there to help people understand what everyone's working on and ensure there are no blockers. If there are blockers such as someone has no tasks or is waiting on someone else, you set up a follow-up meeting with just those people. Then you get your action points.
>> Morning standups force people to be in work before 10:00.
What's wrong with that? Surely 10:00 can be considered core hours for anyone who isn't a remote worker?
>> They always overrun. Rarely are standups shorter than 10 minutes. 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost.
They never last that long in my experience, but even if they did, 30 minutes per person per day to sync up the team sounds reasonable to me.
>> Action points are rarely produced, so the value of the outcome is questionable.
Standups aren't about acquiring 'action points'. They're about knowledge sharing, raising problems and impediments, making progress visible etc. You don't decide during the standup what people should be doing.
>> Others switch off if they’re not interested in the current monologue.
That's why it's a short standup. Its whole reason for being is to avoid long meetings, status updates and overhead. Anyone who can't stay focussed for 15-30 minutes in a morning also has a severe case of ADHD.
>> Notes are rarely taken, so by the time the weekly update gets compiled the team have to scratch their heads about what they did over the last week.
If you have minutes (and agendas and notes etc) then it ceases to be a standup and turns into just another meeting! Again, the whole idea behind the standup is to avoid this kind of stuff.
There is lots you could rant about in agile, but a morning standup is definetly one of the things you should retain.
I've worked at two companies where the day starts at 10am. You'd be surprised how common this is. For people without families and who live in big cities like New York, flex time allows you to go out at night any given night, have a good time, not miss out on sleep, and still have a full day of work by waking up at 9am or 10am. When someone in your team suggests to start the standup fifteen minutes earlier so that no two teams' standups overlap, how do you respond? "I don't want to wake up 15 minutes earlier", or silence?
Morning stands up are a great way for management to ensure people are pressured into showing up for work at a given time without having to be the bad guy and actually say it.
My experience with morning standups is that people arrive to work right before the standup or a few minutes into it, are not in the right mindset to form coherent sentences about their work, and as a result the standup is a slow monotone monologue that no one pays attention to. The one day a week when the manager joins the standup to listen in, everyone faces him and it becomes a report trying to look good and sound like they accomplished a lot that day.
Bottom line, skip the physical standup and use Trello instead!
If you have daily stand-ups, why would you have 30 minutes worth of update per person?
This whole article is pretty extreme. Standups, just like any other process (light-weight or otherwise) is only good until its original intention is being served. If a standup is taking a long time, make it a point to cut it short. If someone is narrating a long story, ask that person to stop and take the rest offline.
Finally, everyone should understand that stand-ups are used to convey status and information about important things. It's not a recital of what each person did the previous day. Sometimes, you might have nothing to say and in that case, just say so. Nobody should be talking about details in standup.
If you have daily stand-ups, why would you have 30 minutes worth of update per person?
What he means is that a 30 minute standup that six people participate in results in 3 hours of lost productivity for the team. It's comparable to the effect of a team meeting for a consulting company. If everyone involved bills their time at, say, $100 an hour, a ten person meeting for an hour costs $1000.
Solution: each persons update is 60 seconds or less. If you need more ask the parties affected to stay after the standup. Teams should be 7 or less in numbers. This way the PM can properly focus. Follow that ... And it works wonders. Also PMs need to be ruthless about the 60 second rule and with being on time. If your later to the stand up you owed a dollar to there team fund which gets donated to charity quarterly.
My feeling is that Project Managers would only be involved in daily standups if there was an urgent issue/escalation, or serious team communication issue that they have the ability to help solve. Or as a stand it for the scrum master if they were on leave.
That's why you start your daily standups 10 to 15 minutes before lunch break. People will quickly state their point, everyone will have a good overview over everything that's going on, and more thorough discussions will go on during lunch. BTDT, and it worked really fine.
I really enjoy the standups on my team; I find them to be incredibly useful. I suppose everyone's standup is different, but we each quickly go over what we had, are and plan on doing, then mention anything that's blocking us. If the blocking issues are something that affects everyone, we discuss for a few minutes, otherwise a few people agree to hang back after the meeting to talk about it. Suddenly your standup is only 5-10 minutes long for 12 people working on 3 or 4 different projects.
Of course, we haven't solved the "you must be in my X:XX" problem, but doesn't every meeting get I the way of flex time?
Standups are like brushing your teeth. If you don't understand it, it makes no sense. If you're just starting, your probably doing it wrong. Most of the time you do it the wrong way (with standups by making it take too long and/or turning it into a status report). There's a structure to it that if you follow it works much better. It's very easy to appear like you're doing it without getting anything from it. Even when you are getting the expected results, they can be invisible. It's a necessary part of your day.
I believe in a meeting-free workday for the team. To do that, the best way I've seen so far is everybody getting together briefly to describe what they've been doing, what they're going to do, and if they need help. Immediately after everybody has their turn doing this, people are all together in one room, they're all aware of who needs help and who is working on what, and they can begin the actual work. Maybe that means everybody grabbing a whiteboard and talking over a problem for an hour. Maybe folks chat for another ten minutes and then all work separately the rest of the day. Don't know, don't care. The team can figure it out. A standup is a dynamic way for a team to create its own daily agenda without using a bunch of calendaring apps and trying to mastermind everything ahead of time.
So when done well, it looks like the most totally natural thing in the world -- bunch of guys just listing what's up to each other and then doing a bit of work ad-hoc. Why would you need structure for that? (Even though there is quite a bit of structure and discipline involved) Aren't we just exchanging data? When done poorly, it's a god-awful thing that drags on, nobody is involved with, and serves no purpose. Blech.
The mistake we continue to make as technologists is to confuse working with data with working with people. When you're writing code, you're working with data. You use tools for data: spreadsheet, compiler, parser, etc. When you're talking about what folks are doing and how the project is going, you're working with people. You use tools for people: lightweight games, rituals, dinners, jokes, body language, etc. You don't use people tools for data tasks; you shouldn't use data tools for people tasks. If you think you could use email to accomplish stuff you do during the standup, you don't understand standups.
Sorry to run on like this, but I'm a big standup fan. In fact, if I had one thing I would want to do in any team, it'd be good standups. For many small teams, you could almost trash every other piece of process and do standups well and be fine.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadIt seems like in his poisonous meetings there is too much detail for everybody.
The most important thing to get out of the meeting, IMHO, is challenges, as status should be evident by the location of your story tickets. The problem with providing an environment where "Others can skim-read or ignore." is that they often will, and peer challenges can easily go unresolved without adequate feedback.
You are standing for a reason - its uncomfortable (for those of us who sit all day). Your facilitator should be roping in the conversation (and if not you need to replace them - rotating among team members often works). If that doesn't work, then your teams are likely too large.
Here's why Standups can be powerful and, actually, a bit subversive. They create Common Knowledge (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) ) of what you are doing. That's different from shared knowledge. Shared knowledge means everyone knows it. Common knowledge means everyone knows everyone knows it (and, recursively, everyone knows everyone knows everyone knows, and so on...). Bob knows you are getting useful work done. So does Tom, your boss. But, thanks to Standup, Tom also knows that Bob knows you are getting your work done. At least in theory, this limits Tom in his ability to isolate, disempower, disparage and ultimately create cause to fire you. Standups move authority away from managerial hands. They're not intended toward that effect, but if they work well, that is something they accomplish.
(Of course, in a closed-allocation company, your boss can just give you impossible or extremely boring work if he wants to flush you out.)
It also needs to be made clear and constitutional that the daily standup is the only status-reporting overhead, except in a production crisis. If there's Daily Standup and your boss gets to interrupt you regularly with status pings (which is a show of power; he probably won't even remember that he asked you, just like people look at their watches but forget to read the time) then you're just getting screwed.
Also, I agree that standup before 10:00 or after 4:00 is just shitty. I'm usually up at 6:00 am, but the idea that you have to have the same schedule as the boss to be a worthwhile human being is just garbage.
I found your post very insightful until you brought in your standard and (imo) off-topic closed-allocation rant.
Standup prevents a manager from saying, "This guy isn't getting any work done". In a closed-allocation company, there's nothing to prevent the manager from assigning terrible or impossible work. It's still unilateral firing; it just takes longer.
"30 minutes", "action points", "notes", "weekly update"?
Seriously, I know that "you're not doing it right" is the standard lame excuse from Scrum-evangelists, but this paints a picture of doing pretty much the opposite of Scrum.
Especially the emphasis placed on the "weekly update" is a big red flag, suggesting this team is doing something that isn't even close to being Agile. Agile and Scrum are supposed to be about delivering working software, and in the case of Scrum it's strictly time boxed. Weekly updates suggest micro-management and/or not delivering anything shippable.
Only the 10:00 versus flex time is a genuine issue. We have a very simple solution for that: if you can't be there, mail it in (or use HipChat). Yes, this also applies to people who start early and are deep in the zone by 10am. It's not supposed to be a two-way conversation anyway, just quickly syncing up.
If you can't make it, we have a phone set up in the middle of the table for people to call in, or you can email someone on the team and they will say your standup for you.
There's your problem. That role is the antithesis of a self organising team. With someone responsible for "managing" that stand up turns into a very expensive way to keep the manager briefed.
A good team will often find ways to achieve these things without requiring the Scrum Master to step in.
*edit: missed a word
My take here is that we should have much smaller teams and if possible have Scrum of Scrums to handle bigger project. However, I know that this might not be possible for some since some project tends not to have a good demarcation on what should be in which teams.
A six person team should be able to be done in less than 10 minutes. If someone gets off topic or rants on about details, stop them, and perhaps suggest a meeting afterwords.
You solution totally ruins the dynamics of the standup.
We currently have only daily progress input via e-mail at Weekdone, but are looking at providing daily e-mail summaries as well.
Appreciate any input how to make a process like that better in a web/e-mail/mobile service.
If the person in question can't be coached to collaborate with others then a role where they can be a sole contributor may be better.
Standups that routinely last longer than 15 minutes need to be corrected. Either split the team, don't have everyone talk every day or find some other way to cut time.
An email is not a terrible substitute if someone is working from home, but part of the value of a standup is that you can quickly ask questions and get answers right there and then.
> 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost
All of this helps if he would have used the common term man hours because 3 hours literally wasn't lost. In my experience the people that make these kinds of claims are the people usually confused about project management, at least for software development, in general.
Unfortunately at larger corporations everything comes down to how many man days a project can fit in a quarter without taking into account the fact that most phases in projects can't fire at the same time due to dependencies.
I actually think Gannt charts model this quite nicely for the higher ups.
In my experience keeping standups under 15min is the easiest part of the process.
Turning the standup into paperwork seems insane to me.
The standup (in Scrum at least) should be three questions everybody answers: What you did yesterday, what you're doing today, any blockers? This should take a team less than 10 minutes easily.
These meetings are not supposed to generate actions points, or problem solve, or discuss anything. They are merely supposed to make sure everybody knows what's going on.
Follow up specifics later with only the people who need to be involved.
The time of the standup should be set by the team not imposed on them. Consensus is needed.
Any bigger questions which arise get discussed over lunch (sometimes) or in later one-on-ones.
Most folks just state what they're doing today, and announce significant deliveries. But not everyone has the instinct to keep it short, especially when asked questions.
Doing this takes some minor training. Someone does need to be active in "gently reminding" people to move the debate/discussion somewhere. (This usually takes the form of, "maybe you should meet at X to hash that out in 15".) Whenever there are new people, you have to get them comfortable asking "I'd like to talk to you about XYZ after the standup". A lot of folks are rather timid at first, and often need to get used to it.
IMO the hidden goal of standups is to make sure a development team communicates, ideally face to face. Why? Because it's extremely valuable to shipping quality code / product etc. My experience has always been when standups over-run, the reason is there's some topic that needs discussing and preventing that discussion from taking place is usually a mistake.
Without standups, in a typical office environment with introverted personality types, communication doesn't happen. So in the end they're a compromise; perhaps not the best solution to the problem but good enough.
(Yes yes you don't have to stand if you have a broken leg etc)
Action points aren't supposed to be produced. Standup's there to help people understand what everyone's working on and ensure there are no blockers. If there are blockers such as someone has no tasks or is waiting on someone else, you set up a follow-up meeting with just those people. Then you get your action points.
>> Morning standups force people to be in work before 10:00.
What's wrong with that? Surely 10:00 can be considered core hours for anyone who isn't a remote worker?
>> They always overrun. Rarely are standups shorter than 10 minutes. 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost.
They never last that long in my experience, but even if they did, 30 minutes per person per day to sync up the team sounds reasonable to me.
>> Action points are rarely produced, so the value of the outcome is questionable.
Standups aren't about acquiring 'action points'. They're about knowledge sharing, raising problems and impediments, making progress visible etc. You don't decide during the standup what people should be doing.
>> Others switch off if they’re not interested in the current monologue.
That's why it's a short standup. Its whole reason for being is to avoid long meetings, status updates and overhead. Anyone who can't stay focussed for 15-30 minutes in a morning also has a severe case of ADHD.
>> Notes are rarely taken, so by the time the weekly update gets compiled the team have to scratch their heads about what they did over the last week.
If you have minutes (and agendas and notes etc) then it ceases to be a standup and turns into just another meeting! Again, the whole idea behind the standup is to avoid this kind of stuff.
There is lots you could rant about in agile, but a morning standup is definetly one of the things you should retain.
Morning stands up are a great way for management to ensure people are pressured into showing up for work at a given time without having to be the bad guy and actually say it.
My experience with morning standups is that people arrive to work right before the standup or a few minutes into it, are not in the right mindset to form coherent sentences about their work, and as a result the standup is a slow monotone monologue that no one pays attention to. The one day a week when the manager joins the standup to listen in, everyone faces him and it becomes a report trying to look good and sound like they accomplished a lot that day.
Bottom line, skip the physical standup and use Trello instead!
If you have daily stand-ups, why would you have 30 minutes worth of update per person?
This whole article is pretty extreme. Standups, just like any other process (light-weight or otherwise) is only good until its original intention is being served. If a standup is taking a long time, make it a point to cut it short. If someone is narrating a long story, ask that person to stop and take the rest offline.
Finally, everyone should understand that stand-ups are used to convey status and information about important things. It's not a recital of what each person did the previous day. Sometimes, you might have nothing to say and in that case, just say so. Nobody should be talking about details in standup.
What he means is that a 30 minute standup that six people participate in results in 3 hours of lost productivity for the team. It's comparable to the effect of a team meeting for a consulting company. If everyone involved bills their time at, say, $100 an hour, a ten person meeting for an hour costs $1000.
My feeling is that Project Managers would only be involved in daily standups if there was an urgent issue/escalation, or serious team communication issue that they have the ability to help solve. Or as a stand it for the scrum master if they were on leave.
I once did an internship at a company where we would do the standup over a conference call, we would also sit. We were such rebels :P.
Of course, we haven't solved the "you must be in my X:XX" problem, but doesn't every meeting get I the way of flex time?
"I don't understand how to do it right, I've had a bad experience therefore it's bad."
WRONG. Complaining about something you don't really understand is what is _poisonous_...
Real life counter-example:
* Standup with a 15 people team lasted 7 minutes every day (worst day, 10 minutes). This included 2 remote members.
* It ran at 10am, so people in flexi time could come as late as possible (core hours start at 10am).
* Scrum master noted all impediments, and those only, so action points were always taken if necessary and skipped if pointless.
The key is: do it right, with self discipline. Agile is a practice, and as with any other practice it takes dedication to master.
Simply doing stuff superficially and then complaining is... unuseful.
I believe in a meeting-free workday for the team. To do that, the best way I've seen so far is everybody getting together briefly to describe what they've been doing, what they're going to do, and if they need help. Immediately after everybody has their turn doing this, people are all together in one room, they're all aware of who needs help and who is working on what, and they can begin the actual work. Maybe that means everybody grabbing a whiteboard and talking over a problem for an hour. Maybe folks chat for another ten minutes and then all work separately the rest of the day. Don't know, don't care. The team can figure it out. A standup is a dynamic way for a team to create its own daily agenda without using a bunch of calendaring apps and trying to mastermind everything ahead of time.
So when done well, it looks like the most totally natural thing in the world -- bunch of guys just listing what's up to each other and then doing a bit of work ad-hoc. Why would you need structure for that? (Even though there is quite a bit of structure and discipline involved) Aren't we just exchanging data? When done poorly, it's a god-awful thing that drags on, nobody is involved with, and serves no purpose. Blech.
The mistake we continue to make as technologists is to confuse working with data with working with people. When you're writing code, you're working with data. You use tools for data: spreadsheet, compiler, parser, etc. When you're talking about what folks are doing and how the project is going, you're working with people. You use tools for people: lightweight games, rituals, dinners, jokes, body language, etc. You don't use people tools for data tasks; you shouldn't use data tools for people tasks. If you think you could use email to accomplish stuff you do during the standup, you don't understand standups.
Sorry to run on like this, but I'm a big standup fan. In fact, if I had one thing I would want to do in any team, it'd be good standups. For many small teams, you could almost trash every other piece of process and do standups well and be fine.
Sounds like all of you have developer communication issues, not standup issues.