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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

#41

Post by wpietri »

Deestan wrote: post #37

What I dislike about this is how preoccupied people are with how the rules of daily meetings should be enforced. As if it is a given that a) there must be daily meetings, and b) they must be defined as rules . I would rather we focused on the goal instead: The dev team must be coordinated, and they must not deviate enormously from the schedule without the project manager at least knowing about it. So here's our proce…

Well, as long as there are observable regularities in your work, you have a process, just not a formal process. As long as there is a way for people to do things and get called out or admonished for it, you have norms, just not explicit rules.

What you're talking about is, at least in the Agile world, described with the shu-ha-ri model. People at the "shu" level really want rules so they know what to do. People at the "ha" level want rules for others. It's only at the "ri" level, that of mastery, that you can fluidly do what works without discussion.

Getting a team to self-organization is tricky. Sometimes rules help.

For example, I know one team that really loved their daily stand-up, but they had a problem with chronic lateness wasting a lot of time. So for a while they created a rule that lateness was punished by $1/minute into the beer jar. I once saw the CEO put $45 in. He was pretty pissed, but he was on time after that. Eventually, everybody got their shit together and they didn't need the rule anymore.

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

#42

Post by wpietri »

swanson wrote: post #28
wpietri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If people are actually listing classes in the stand-up, I agree that's a problem. For me the stand-up "did yesterday" content is more, "We worked on X and have it almost finished. In the course of that, we made a neat utility for X, and cleaned up some ugly code in Y. If anybody wants to talk about refactoring Y further, let's talk."

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

#43

Post by wpietri »

mindcrime wrote: post #25
wpietri wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appr…

Yeah, I could imagine contexts where not much is going on, or where the work is pretty routine, or where collaboration is low. In which case, no need to talk frequently.

I usually work in exploratory, high-volatility contexts, where there's plenty to talk about. I also favor continuous deployment; I think the last shop averaged about a release per engineer per day.

Given that very exploratory context, I also really like people generally being present. If that's the default, you can iterate much more quickly.

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

#44

Post by codex »

Daily meetings are not really for obtaining useful status information. They're about habituating people into doing real work every day, so that they don't feel like jackasses when they have to report to their peers that they didn't do anything yesterday.

People ostensibly do work to get paid, but that's not really what motivates them to get anything done. Fear of losing face is one such motivation. The dollar is the currency of this century, but social currency is millions of years old and works much better.

And that is why these meetings must be face to face; email doesn't generate enough shame.

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

#45

Post by Deestan »

wpietri wrote: post #41
Deestan wrote: post #37

What I dislike about this is how preoccupied people are with how the rules of daily meetings should be enforced. As if it is a given that a) there must be daily meetings, and b) they must be defined as rules . I would rather we focused on the goal instead: The dev team must be coordinated, and they must not deviate enormously from the schedule without the project manager at least knowing about it. So here's our proce…

Well, as long as there are observable regularities in your work, you have a process, just not a formal process. As long as there is a way for people to do things and get called out or admonished for it, you have norms, just not explicit rules. What you're talking about is, at least in the Agile world, described with the shu-ha-ri model. People at the "shu" level really want rules so they know what to do. People at th…

> Getting a team to self-organization is tricky. Sometimes rules help.

Absolutely true. I actually feel bad for not emphasizing that properly. Teams of self-organizing people aren't as common as it should be.

My point is that we should not add rules unless we really need to, and that people are more likely to self-organize if given freedom.

E.g. If we turned out to have actual persistent problems communicating to the project manager, we would introduce rules.

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

#46

Post by mindcrime »

wpietri wrote: post #43
mindcrime wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appr…

Yeah, I could imagine contexts where not much is going on, or where the work is pretty routine, or where collaboration is low. In which case, no need to talk frequently. I usually work in exploratory, high-volatility contexts, where there's plenty to talk about. I also favor continuous deployment; I think the last shop averaged about a release per engineer per day. Given that very exploratory context, I also really l…

People can talking without having a daily, scheduled, standup meeting! If the only time people are talking is during the standup, I would consider that an anti-pattern. :-)

I'm certainly not advocating not communicating or collaborating, and frequently. Just saying that the daily standup isn't always required.

Given that very exploratory context, I also really like people generally being present. If that's the default, you can iterate much more quickly.

Fair enough.

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