Standups are Poisonous

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...

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.

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.

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.