
3 Tips for Effective Stand-Up Meetings - lfittl
https://www.blossom.io/blog/2012/09/17/3-tips-for-quick-effective-stand-up-meetings.html
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DanielBMarkham
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.

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tcharron
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>)

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tcharron
Sorry, original owly link was broken, try: <http://ow.ly/dOqfI>

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bryanlarsen
Here's another great tip:

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.

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tosh
Hey Brian,

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.

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mmahemoff
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.

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darkxanthos
If it works for them then they're doing "Agile" perfectly. The point is
optimizing value and that's individual to every team/company.

Ironically, this dogma is what the founders of Agile were trying to avoid.

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tcharron
"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>

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tcharron
Sorry, original owly link was broken. Try: <http://ow.ly/dOqfI>

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rikf
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. :)

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tosh
Hey :)

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!

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jrajav
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.

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redguava
I question the idea of having a meeting every day whether you need it or not.

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.

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TianCaiBenBen
We had daily stand-up meeting. But I did not attend it any more after talking
to manager.

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.

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tcharron
I would suggest in that case, that you have a daily status meeting and not a
daily stand-up then.

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.

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Smudge
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.

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kzahel
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.

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tcharron
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.

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squarecat
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...

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tosh
Hey squarecat,

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.

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maximilianburke
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?

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MikeCodeAwesome
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.

