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Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

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Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#21

Post by wpietri »

swanson wrote: post #6

Of the Three Pillars of Standup (what you did yesterday[1], what you are doing today[2], what are you stuck on[3]) I really only find [3] to be of much value. Git log/Kanban board can tell you [1]/[2] if you actually need to know these things (hint: you probably don't unless you are manager/team lead/product owner). Kanban blocker stickies can do [3] but I think a designated "safe haven" to get help is useful, at lea…

> hint: you probably don't unless you are manager/team lead/product owner

Depends on how you're working. I prefer a collective responsibility model. I know some people prefer to have their units of work spoon-fed to them, and are willing to trust some manager that everything will fit together in the end. But especially at startups, I think things go better when everybody feels responsible for the results.

I do agree that minimizing 1 and 2 is good, but I think you can get a lot of that just by holding the meeting around a physical Kanban board and letting people point at things.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#22

Post by onemorepassword »

Part 32904 in the continuing saga of "my stand-ups suck, so all stand-ups suck".

Sorry, not even going to bother with non-snark response. I did that the 32903 times before, and someone else already took the bait.

But I'll bite on this though:

> All meetings are terrible.

Meetings can be awesome. I've been to meetings full of great new ideas. I've been in meetings that saved companies. I've been in meetings in which shit was actually decided and followed up on!

I've been in meetings that lasted for days(!) but eliminated months of painful processes and left people feeling exhausted but victorious.

Meetings can be great. Meetings can be fun. Meetings can have a purpose. Meetings can have results. Meetings can change the world.

It's badly organized, forced and unproductive meetings with the wrong people that suck. Guess what, that applies to virtually any activity with a group of people. Including orgies. Especially orgies.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#23

Post by wpietri »

mindcrime wrote: post #20
wpietri wrote: post #15

This article is like magic! By which I mean the exciting part is all misdirection. In meetings, the time lost is obvious. Which is why people focus on doing them well. By moving it to email, you're not saving time; you're just hiding it. And, I'm sure, increasing it. I'm a fast writer. I practice pretty much every day. But there is no way I could write my standup contributions as quickly as just saying them. I'd gues…

To write a decent status update, I have to guess at all the reasonable questions and head most of them off. It is much more work I think the assumption here is that there is a very limited set of basic questions that apply to everybody and that become the default. For example: "What did you work on yesterday?" "What are you working on today?" "Do you have any blockers or concerns?" If you just got everybody to submit…

Sure, and I am saying it takes a lot more work to write that up well than to have a conversation.

I guess it could be that people were answering those things in an entirely dull way. In which case, no wonder the meeting was seen as worthless. I'd suggest putting the boring information in a shared artifact. Personally, I tend to use as physical board. I also see virtual teams using a virtual board (like Trello) for that.

The value of the stand-up is in what people say that goes beyond the obvious.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#24

Post by mhurron »

beat wrote: post #14
mhurron wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're blocked, why don't you just contact the scrum master directly when you are. Why do you have to get everyone together to mention it.

Because you have a widely experienced team and you don't know who might have the answer.

Even with that, a email would suffice.

The scheduled, mandatory standups interrupt everyone the same as any other meeting.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#25

Post by mindcrime »

wpietri wrote: post #23
mindcrime wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To write a decent status update, I have to guess at all the reasonable questions and head most of them off. It is much more work I think the assumption here is that there is a very limited set of basic questions that apply to everybody and that become the default. For example: "What did you work on yesterday?" "What are you working on today?" "Do you have any blockers or concerns?" If you just got everybody to submit…

Sure, and I am saying it takes a lot more work to write that up well than to have a conversation. I guess it could be that people were answering those things in an entirely dull way. In which case, no wonder the meeting was seen as worthless. I'd suggest putting the boring information in a shared artifact. Personally, I tend to use as physical board. I also see virtual teams using a virtual board (like Trello) for th…

The value of the stand-up is in what people say that goes beyond the obvious.

I agree. I just don't necessarily think that you need that level of interaction for a status meeting every day. OK, maybe some teams do.. and I can see why some people might prefer it. But my experience has been that it's overkill.

That said, different teams, different cultures, different situations, could definitely dictate different approaches.

My biggest gripe with the daily meetings is that they force a context switch that somehow seems to always come at the most awkward possible time, no matter when you schedule the meeting. Requiring lots of face-to-face meetings also runs counter to the idea of having distributed teams and a lot of "work remotely" flexibility, which I also tend to favor.

But, again, YMMV.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#26

Post by mbesto »

mindcrime wrote: post #17
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

Ok, I'll take the bait. I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer. Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. S…

Standups are about physically looking each other in the eye, figuring out where everybody is, and figuring out if you can help. It's not information, and it's really not discussion. I don't know... for most "here's what I did yesterday, here's what I'm doing today, here are my blockers" type meetings, I don't see that "look 'em in the eye" is that critical and certainly not on a daily basis. At least that's been my e…

Context switching from what? If you're standup is first thing when you get into the office, your context switch is from a cup of coffee.

they can really f%!# with somebody's ability to get into - and stay in - "flow state"

I call BS. I can't for the life of me, find one consistent thing that can either get me into or get me out of a state of flow. It just happens. If you know the answer than I can create and scale the most perfect team of human engineers ever on this planet.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#27

Post by mindcrime »

mbesto wrote: post #26
mindcrime wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standups are about physically looking each other in the eye, figuring out where everybody is, and figuring out if you can help. It's not information, and it's really not discussion. I don't know... for most "here's what I did yesterday, here's what I'm doing today, here are my blockers" type meetings, I don't see that "look 'em in the eye" is that critical and certainly not on a daily basis. At least that's been my e…

Context switching from what? If you're standup is first thing when you get into the office, your context switch is from a cup of coffee. they can really f%!# with somebody's ability to get into - and stay in - "flow state" I call BS. I can't for the life of me, find one consistent thing that can either get me into or get me out of a state of flow. It just happens. If you know the answer than I can create and scale th…

Context switching from what?

Depends on what time it's scheduled, and what time you come in. Could be anything.

If you're standup is first thing when you get into the office, your context switch is from a cup of coffee.

Absolutely. And if every member of your team arrives at the same time, and that time happens to coincide with "time to grab a cup of coffee then beat it to the room for the meeting" then sure, that makes sense. I haven't found that to be the case for most of the teams I've worked on.

I call BS. I can't for the life of me, find one consistent thing that can either get me into or get me out of a state of flow.

I can't identify one specific thing to get into flow state, but I can give you a laundry list of things that will break my "flow" once I get there. And having to go to a meeting is pretty much at the top of the list. shrug

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#28

Post by swanson »

wpietri wrote: post #21
swanson wrote: post #6

Of the Three Pillars of Standup (what you did yesterday[1], what you are doing today[2], what are you stuck on[3]) I really only find [3] to be of much value. Git log/Kanban board can tell you [1]/[2] if you actually need to know these things (hint: you probably don't unless you are manager/team lead/product owner). Kanban blocker stickies can do [3] but I think a designated "safe haven" to get help is useful, at lea…

> hint: you probably don't unless you are manager/team lead/product owner Depends on how you're working. I prefer a collective responsibility model. I know some people prefer to have their units of work spoon-fed to them, and are willing to trust some manager that everything will fit together in the end. But especially at startups, I think things go better when everybody feels responsible for the results. I do agree…

Sure - definitely agree with you on seeing all the pieces fit together. I get a way better picture of that with other methods (Kanban, story map) than from someone listing which classes they wrote yesterday.

Once you learn to "read the board" as a team, 1/2 can largely go away. And the best part is that the board is asynchronous - I can go look at it whenever I want without bothering anybody.

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#29

Post by Spearchucker »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

Ok, I'll take the bait. I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer. Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. S…

Unfortunately these daily meetings hardly ever work out that way -

In Scrum, for example, a daily project team meeting occurs. It’s called a daily scrum, or stand-up. The stand-up has guidelines, including limiting the meeting length to 15 minutes. My experience is that this never occurs – stand-ups usually run on for at least half an hour, during which I’m subjected to anecdotes, show-offs, excuses and, if I’m really unlucky, insinuations and blame. The worst stand-ups include managers – their presence turns any self-respecting stand-up into a status report.

Ref. http://www.wittenburg.co.uk/Entry.aspx?id=dce9dde8-d770-47c2...

Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

#30

Post by vacri »

wpietri wrote: post #15

This article is like magic! By which I mean the exciting part is all misdirection. In meetings, the time lost is obvious. Which is why people focus on doing them well. By moving it to email, you're not saving time; you're just hiding it. And, I'm sure, increasing it. I'm a fast writer. I practice pretty much every day. But there is no way I could write my standup contributions as quickly as just saying them. I'd gues…

Well said. In my experience, standups were short and covered a lot of ground. Problems were rapidly back-and-forthed. If you didn't have a standup, people would get annoyed because they needed to jaw with the group on something. It was a small, diverse team (one hardware guy, one firmware, two web, two support, a smattering of others) and that may have contributed to the need to cover ground quickly, but the idea that the daily meeting is by default a waste of time is laughable.

Trying to convey a lot of the things we encountered in text would have taken a lot more than 2 min/day, unless you were satisfied with rubbish and unilluminating two-liners. Sure, some days would go by with everyone saying 'going fine, nothing here', in which case we lost all of two to three minutes - around the same time as this magical email that apparently covers the more complex stuff.

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