You don’t need standups

But you're right to point this out. I think I phrased my post badly. The caveat isn't the important part. The second point is the really important one. The decision framework for when to take any specific piece of advice is more important than the advice itself. In general (and this is definitely true with development process advice), advice is plentiful and often conflicting, and most of it gives you ideas of what to do, but doesn't tell you when it's applicable. The really good books, courses, and blog posts I've found do exactly that.

1. Worked with a team of outside experts once. We were brought in to stand up an internal team of coaches. The first week there, the four of us got together. I asked "Do we want to do standups?"

Another coach said nope, we're professionals! What do we need standups for?

The rest of us met every morning for breakfast. No standing up, no meeting. But we knew what we had to cover in between shooting the crap.

We did well. He did not.

2. Worked with another team once who were doing some gnarly embedded work. The lead, a super-smart C++ guy, announced that he wasn't going to do standups because he was a professional (see a pattern here?) and could communicate just fine without tossing a football around.

He finally came. Every morning the team would have fun with the nerf ball (which is just something fun to toss around. Who cares if you have one or not?) When it was his turn, everybody stopped smiling and somebody put the little football on the ground at his feet. Then he spoke. He never did touch the nerf ball.

I was trying to help them do mocks and rapid hardware prototyping, but he wasn't getting it. Finally one day, just after the standup, somebody said something like "You know John, if we did this thing like this, we could work a lot faster"

He said he hadn't thought of that (even though multiple people had suggested it. It just wasn't phrased the right way for some reason) and agreed to start right away.

I smiled as he left and asked him "Wasn't that a great standup!"

"Nope. Could've had that conversation just the same without the stupid meeting"

Yes, you could have. But you didn't. Communication is weird. There are no big, flashing red lights when you fuck it up. And when it works, it doesn't feel like anything has happened.

So when people want to do things differently, I always encourage it. If they focus on the goal, they'll come back to these lessons. If they focus on the ritual, however, it'll never ever make any sense to them. (And they very well may end up making life miserable on everybody around them)

We do this on top of a good culture of asking for help and posting regular updates on our internal Sprint tracker, it works quite well.

The problem is that you are looking for the maximum amount of valuable communication with the minimum amount of overhead. That is almost impossible to reliably quantify, however, because each team develops their own communication and language style. This is the tension we face: outside folks who mean well want to standardize things so that teams have a better chance of succeeding. But the only thing they accomplish by doing this is creating a lot of friction, waste, and overhead. It does not matter if your TPS report has a cover sheet or whether your standup is at noon or not. Nor does it matter whether you're using Trello or crayons. You're focusing on the wrong thing.

If we limit our discussion to teams located in one place using a physical board, I have noticed that standups that focus on the board, the work, happen with better teams. (They don't make teams better. Good teams tend to do it that way). A few useful tokens of testable work on the wall that people can point at and talk about how those goals are going tends to focus the conversation around value.

On the other end of the spectrum, large spreadsheets or online tools where each person reports on what they're doing usually show a completely waste of time and a death march. I worked with a VP once of a major corporation that kept a 100-300 line spreadsheet with "promises" he received from all his teams. We spent every Monday morning for hours reviewing each promise and talking about how we had failed the clan and dishonored ourselves. Oof. It was horrible.

1. https://leanpub.com/info-ops