
Standups are Poisonous - ghr
http://garethrees.co.uk/2013/03/28/standups-are-poisonous/
======
onemorepassword
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.

"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.

~~~
darxius
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.

~~~
mbehrendt
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.

~~~
ratherbefuddled
> project managers

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.

~~~
mbehrendt
True.

------
ratherbefuddled
Simple answer: You're doing it wrong.

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.

~~~
tristan_juricek
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.

------
slu
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.

------
benjaminwootton
You are missing the point of a standup somewhat.

>> 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.

~~~
heliodor
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!

------
benaston
I'll chime in - _your_ standups are poisonous. I can sympathise though because
I've been there too. It is a symptom of a junior team with weak team
leadership/standup facilitation. Long monologues should be cut short and
"taken offline". Action points aren't needed because they should be actioned
immediately if they are quick or turned into cards on the wall. Your email
"solution" likely won't be read or actioned.

------
JackMorgan
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.

~~~
anthonyb
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).

------
DanielBMarkham
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.

------
sklivvz1971
It's FUD, FUD, FUD.

 _"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.

------
Swannie
All the other comments are basically saying the same thing - you're doing it
wrong. I want to address your suggestions:

I've tried to do the whole "email instead of standup" thing. Guess what? No
one reads the damn email. No one cares. Nothing happens. The stand up is meant
to get people _talking_ and not reading emails.

Yes, I documented out standups. This was because, yes, people can't make every
call, can't make it to the office, are on holiday and need to know quickly if
there were people waiting on them for feedback. So they could review the daily
"minutes" and see if someone needed to talk to them. This worked well, though
it usually took an additional 10 mins of my time finishing the email before
sending it out.

And yes, management needed to report on progress. I tried my hardest to keep
my devs OUT of the weekly progress call, and insist only team leads be
present, but management weren't happy (and tended towards micromanagement of
issues, but that's a different story).

And whatever you do, don't ditch the stand up. It's the best part of the day
if you're truly a team player, as you can find out where you can make the
biggest contributions to your team. If you notice patterns of issues, you can
work to solve them. I've worked in too many teams where you could go for days,
that turned into weeks, without talking to a quiet and reserved team member
about the specific technical problems they were working on. Not good.

------
_ak
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.

------
mmahemoff
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.

------
Proleps
> _Morning standups force people to be in work before 10:00. Great when you’re
> supposed to have the benefit of flexi-time._

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.

------
rehashed
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.

------
harryf
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.

------
pasbesoin
The problem section reads like: Agile meets corporate, and loses. (Perhaps an
inevitably outcome.)

The solution reads vaguely like: We're already distributed (in time -- flexi-
time -- if nothing else), so manage us like a distributed team.

The solution still strikes me as somewhat too bureaucratic, vis à vis the
intent of a "standup" ("daily X", etc. -- choose your own name), as I see it.
That being to informally, loosely, but effectively sync members' working
states and awareness. Everyone should be free to take what notes are
personally meaningful to them.

But formal documentation should be a separate track. That would include the
"agenda / meeting notes" PDF CYA that appears to be going on and/or proposed,
here.

------
Karunamon
I hate meetings.

I feel that the entire concept of the standup forces face-to-face interaction
where none is necessary. Time that I'm wasting sitting in a room is time where
my fingers aren't on the keyboard making things happen.

You do not need voice and physical presence to organize a project, or ensure
everyone is on the same metaphorical page, or to find out what everyone is
doing.

Imagine the communications medium of your choice, and then ask if the meeting
couldn't just as easily be coordinated via that system instead of forcing
everyone to get in a room and waste valuable time? And get you benefits such
as easy access and archivability?

~~~
piva00
You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You
know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero
a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by
himself, right?

I've worked 5 years in an exclusively office environment, flexible time but we
weren't allowed to work from home, for the last 2 years I've worked almost
exclusively from home and I from my experience I can say that some days I
would be more productive if I'd met some guy for a face-to-face conversation.

I do Skype meetings all the time, or Google Hangouts, none of the tools I use
for remotely talk to people make me as dynamic as I can be face-to-face. I
can't grab a piece of paper and sketch something to illustrate my point, I
can't gesticulate to show something better than only my words or my webcam
showing something can.

I have lost HOURS on meetings + sketching things with digital tools (Skitch,
diagrams, etc) that I could've explained a lot better in person.

You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social
interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up. And
that's what standup "meetings" are, just "gatherings" not meetings, if you
think that meeting has a bad connotation. Standup meetings/gatherings just
bring everyone to the same page in about 10 minutes, no e-mail, Skype or
Google Hangout can do that, I'm sorry.

~~~
Karunamon
>You know that you can make things happen when you talk them out, right? You
know that you make things happen with other people, no one can be a lone hero
a run a product, company or any other greater humanity organization just by
himself, right?

You know that "talking" as in using voice communication face to face is not
the only way to make things happen, right? You know that I didn't mention
_anything_ about being a lone hero or anything of the sort, right?

>You can hate meetings all day long, I hate them too, but I don't hate social
interactions, I don't hate face-to-face conversations to clear things up.

The social interaction isn't a problem, it's that the meeting is a
fundamentally inefficient way to accomplish what can be done better in many
different ways with other tools. If everyone is so prone to wander that it
requires an inefficient and expensive (both in opportunity cost to time that
could be spent solving other problems or actually doing _productive_ work, and
the cost of paying someone to drop everything and talk about doing work
instead of doing work), it would seem to speak to a larger problem, either
with processes, procedures, or people.

This goes double when the content of the meeting doesn't require anything but
status updates or some other kind of communication which translates mostly
seamlessly to plain, searchable, referencable text.

------
jkaljundi
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.

------
calpaterson
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.

~~~
podperson
I think the original writer means 30min of wasted time for six people, not
30min ranting per person.

~~~
calpaterson
I really hope that was the case, but he did say this:

> 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost

~~~
johnbellone
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.

------
donnfelker
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.

~~~
Swannie
PM? Surely you mean the scrum master? :-)

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.

------
vpeters25
This is what usually happens when you have a poorly trained scrummaster. One
of the reasons there are so many $AGILE_PROCESS_NAME sucks posts on the
internet.

I respectfully disagree with all the "you are doing it wrong" replies. In this
case, it's not your or your team's fault, but your scrummaster is definitely
doing it wrong.

I've been scrummaster on teams over 12 people and our daily standup meetings
lasted around 3 minutes and rarely got to 10 minutes or over.

In agile, the team self-manages itself. If 10 am is not working, change it. If
meetings are taking too long, bring it up as a blocker on the standup itself
or on the next retrospective (you guys do these, right?). Have the team agree
on making adjustments but focus on one adjustment every iteration.

In short: Inspect and Adapt

------
karterk
_6 person team x 30 minutes = 3 hours lost._

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.

~~~
bdunn
_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.

------
Sunlis
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?

------
tjtrapp
To curtail the length, have you tried using the "parking lot" option?

If someone starts to get off on a topic that isn't related to "what i
completed yesterday", "what im going to complete today", "any impediments"
then raise your hand and call "parking lot". This informs the person to wait
until after standup to have the conversation.

The first time I did it people thought I was crazy. I got looks like, "who the
heck is this guy to cut me off?" but the next few times I start to raise my
hand, the person realizes and ends their talking.

Give it a shot. Google "stand up parking lot" for more info.

------
fadzlan
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.

------
ascotan
Having been a project lead and scrum master in the past, I've found there are
a few real purposes to scrum imho.

1\. It should be a place were the lead helps people coordinate. Not just work,
but their schedules. If dev A will be finishing up widget A on Wed. then dev B
knows he needs to hustle, etc.

2\. It's a place where QA can get a grip on what's happening in development.
Most of the time QA has no idea what's going on in dev, and having the QA guys
in scrum helps them.

3\. It forces lazy devs (who spend all day on youtube) to actually report
status the next day in front of all the other devs.

A few more thoughts.

1\. It should be around 15 minutes. Too short and it just becomes a round
robin. That's great, but a lead should be able to adjust the work and
coordinate at scrum. You can't really do that in 3-5 minutes. If it's too
long, the devs get cranky because you're killing their dev time.

2\. No PMs. Project managers imho should not attend scrums because they speak
a different language (it's called powerpoint) and they usually a) don't
understand what's being said b) freak out when qa says there's a bug c) like
to get on a soapbox about schedules and releases when it's not appropriate.

It's far better to have the lead/leads manage the PM separately be delivering
separate status reports to him directly (either through email or a formal
report-like deliverable).

3\. No more than 10 people. I would say around 6 is best, but you can't have a
15 minute scrum, when the number of people is too large. If you have more
people, you need to split them into groups of 6-10 and then have a
'superscrum' for the leads. This type of 'superscrum' is great for have the PM
join in, because it can focus mainly on resource management and schedules
(which is what PMs love to talk about).

@OP I've actually have asked for people to report status via email
(particularly when I have a bunch of remote guys), and it's really terrible.
You end up getting a bunch of emails which you have to respond to. That's
great if your a developer and you can put you AD LIB email on a cron job for
the lead, but for the lead, the coordination of the team via email will eat up
most of your morning. It simply better to call in or show up and everyone be
in the same room for 15 minutes.

------
Morendil
Useless blog post: "X is a dumb idea, when we tried it Y happened which is
bad."

Useful blog post: "We tried X expecting Z, but instead Y happened. I wonder
what's going on, please chime in."

The mistake here isn't "negativity", it's Z-blindness. It's missing out on an
opportunity to revise your model of how the world works, by noting that there
is a discrepancy between your expectations and how things actually turned out.

(Of course, the "useful" approach results in less sensational titles, which
may be why we see fewer of those.)

------
motoprog
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.

------
securingsincity
One of the most telling things I've ever heard about the daily standup was its
a way to get introverted people to speak just once a day...

------
rubyrescue
Inaka does daily standups, at 11, in a HipChat room. You should know what
you're working on in the morning before then, that gives you time to get some
work done, take a 1 minute break and announce what you're doing. It's pretty
rare we don't know what that list is anyway but it's a good synchronization
point. If something is off or questions ensue, we meet in person.

------
jimgumbley
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.

------
podperson
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.

------
scottmagdalein
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).

------
walshemj
Um am I the only person who is surprised that the OP doesn't know that
flexitime has the concept of core hours a 10 oclock start is not unreasonable.

Though he's right teams should know how how to run meetings and Action Points.

------
westonplatter0
It seems like everyone is arguing about macro issues. Point, some team members
know how to communicate and make standup effective and others blab.

Sounds like all of you have developer communication issues, not standup
issues.

------
cshimy
So Gareth...tell me about your retrospectives...

------
norswap
Wanted to subscribe, no RSS :/

------
Uchikoma
They work for us.

------
michaelochurch
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.

~~~
kami8845
>(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.)

I found your post very insightful until you brought in your standard and (imo)
off-topic closed-allocation rant.

~~~
michaelochurch
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.

