Standups are Poisonous

> 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.

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?

They work for us.

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.

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.