Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
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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
#2From the title I was expecting to disagree, but this isn't about "not having" the meetings, it's about taking them offline. I think I agree with this. I should have done this at my previous job. The devs had flexible schedules (which I support), and trying to have a fixed schedule for daily stand-ups was unworkable and I eventually gave up. This would have worked much better.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#3This has it's own set of problems, namely, it is more difficult to do this over email than it is to just talk face-to-face; that is, it is slower.
Yes, what the author offers here is asynchronous and most developers love that idea. However, in practice I've seen this method fail more often than it succeeds. Why?
Face-to-face synchronous communication matters. Problems are addressed quickly, brainstorms happen. Personal relationships develop; mentors and mentee relationships evolve. Perhaps another developer had your problem with some pesky JS library last week and gives you just the clue you needed, and so on. I actually think standup meetings are not only not the worst thing ever, but the best thing ever for a growing developer as they allow them to quickly see what others are doing, and quickly get feedback on their own work.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#4I used to work as a process engineer at a semiconductor manufacturing plant. The plant ran 24/7, so we had (almost) round-the-clock engineering coverage. "Stand-up" meetings weren't viable because many of the engineers on the same team would work at different hours, so at the end of the day each engineer was required to send a "passdown" via e-mail.
A passdown included the experiments that ran on your reactor for the day, the experiments that were planned for the next day, and potential research directions based on the results. With a trail of passdowns, any engineer could easily pick up on the thread of logic from the previous engineer and continue working in their stead (if they are on their weekend, vacation, sick, etc.).
The nature of the job necessitated leaving behind a trail for someone else to follow, but I think it's a great process to be adapted to other work environments.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#5Ok, 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. So what? Meetings usually involve sitting around, an agenda, a leader, a desired set of outcomes, and so forth. Standups really don't have any of that in the traditional sense. The output from a standup is just an informal agenda for the day. People meet, they discuss what's up, they break up and informally get together to do stuff. Standups are designed to prevent meetings, not be another one.
"Because it’s the information that’s great: the meetings are time-sinks."
No, it's about non-verbal communication and social interaction around common team problems. We've found that listing the 3 things helps do that. You might get the same effect with having each person act out an improv based on their feelings. I don't know. Give it a shot. But it's not about information. No. No. No, no no. Technology teams are made of people, not robots, and the work of everybody getting on the same page and keeping up is a human job full of social nuance, not the exchange of status information.
Later on we get here:
"...the only benefit to having a meeting is the face-to-face discussion that it allows for. Or, to put it another way: if you’re structuring your meeting around trying to eliminate anything that isn’t a two-minute “this is what I did/am doing/am having trouble with” update, why are you having a meeting at all?"
"Discussion" a much better word, but you're once again assuming that it's all some kind of information flow happening. The hardest part of working in technology teams is the social factor, not the bandwidth of information flow. 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'll put in a plug for anybody that's interested: I've created a no-frills "Agile Team Tune-up" email course. No selling, just a weekly concept explained with ways to apply in your team. If you're interested, here's the sign-up: http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#6Of 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 least for teams of varying skill level and comfort with one another.
My favorite standups have been the ones that "devolved" (in the formal capital-A Agile sense) to "Anyone blocked?" crickets "Okay. Good standup."
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#7Of 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…
You know, you have an excellent point. If you wanted to tweak standups, how about just doing #3? Everybody say where you're blocked and how we can help. Boom. Standup over.
It'd be fun to try.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#8There are other costs to daily meetings - namely when should you have them? If you have them in the middle of the day, you interrupt the schedule. At the end of the day, then the energy you're looking to develop in the meeting goes the wrong direction (plus it inevitably interrupts someone who was in flow and just wanted to keep working). Therefore you want it at the beginning of the day.
But what if people want to start their days at different times? Now they can't!
I feel this a lot right now. Due to unexpected personal circumstances I have wound up needing to go from "provide child support" to "provide financial support". So I just began a job search. But one past employer who would be otherwise reasonable to apply to went onto my list of places to avoid applying to for a while. Why? Because most of their teams have daily standups at around 9:30-10 AM, and there is still rush hour traffic around Los Angeles at that time. I'd like to spend the morning with my kids, get ready, arrive at 11 AM and totally miss rush hour. (Then leave late and miss it on the other end as well!) But they can't accommodate that.
If you have daily meetings, have you discouraged someone from working for you? Quite possibly so. But if my experience is a guide, you probably won't even hear about it.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#9We have these kind of daily meetings and I would never replace them with an email thread. Answering the three questions in writing would not only be more burdensome but you would also lose out on the valuable instant feedback.
Re: Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them
#10Of 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…
You know, you have an excellent point. If you wanted to tweak standups, how about just doing #3? Everybody say where you're blocked and how we can help. Boom. Standup over. It'd be fun to try.
Yep - a team near my desk routinely has sub-30 second standups following that format. I am probably a bit sour on standups in general since my last project had 10+ person, 15+ minute meetings (sometimes with the client present...) that added very little value for their cost ($1XX x 0.25 x 12).