No affiliation, just seems like a cool product. Probably wouldn't be hard to whip something similar up if it's not already on GitHub.
I think you're right to wonder about alternatives, though. The aspects of Geekbot we use would be fairly easy to replace with a bot of our own. Geekbot pricing has a very narrow sweet spot, which I imagine varies significantly by team.
There is an ingraned urge to interrupt everyone and force people to waste 30 minutes of their daily time.
There are a few others to try. I don't think any has a distinct advantage, just varying levels of polish. But I would recommend using it, especially for (semi-)remote teams.
The concept is pretty similar. Not everyone uses it, but I like having it to keep track of my work.
If you replace the standup with written reports, I doubt anyone but the manager will actually read them. I know I wouldn't, regardless of how valuable it seems in the abstract.
Daily, repeated form-filling is hard for creatives. Never heard of Assembla but if you were my manager and you were repeatedly needling me to fill out some form, every day, when I'd rather just give you a few words over chat (or in person)... I would most definitely push back.
Of course, in my case, I didn't wake up on the first day and put this in place. I spent a few months trying to get people to send in their standups every day, but realised that I can't possibly do it everyday with an expanding team and it didn't make for the best use of my time. Because filling in your standup is a quick part (quick because it shouldn't take you longer than five to ten minutes to fill it up) of the process that needs to be followed, the most efficient alternative was to create a bot to remind those who can't remember to do. Plus, the number one reason I got from people who failed to do it was that they simply forgot.
Try trusting them instead.
Signed, Micromanagee
If I was telling them what to do, what results to expect _and_ how to do it, then I would be micro-managing.
Don't Lumbergh your way through it - "So, Peter, what's happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?"
If the point of standups in scrum are to find out what an individual has been working on, every day, then this could feel like micromanaging to some people.
The end goal of standups, the way I understand it, is to figure out what people in your team are doing and what they are stuck at in order to:
* align people towards individual goals in the sprint that require collaboration; * remove impediments that are beyond the control of team members and that may cause delays; * improve task and load distribution, so that some members aren't overburdened while others are slacking off (if you run a short sprint and give team member autonomy to work, tasks that require collaboration from several team members can tend to become bottlenecks, as I have experienced).
I suppose you could well call it micro-managing if these standups were used to manage individuals instead of the process. In my view however, standups help you gather data to manage and improve the process, so as to make things favourable for the team.
If you have to closely observe or repeatedly needle your team for information, something is wrong. Programmers are largely introverts doing high-focus activities; we need to be left alone.
We (as in my team) don't strictly follow formal practice, though we have standups and I try to follow LEAN. Our git server sends email notifications with each push and I find these are wonderful for peering into what other people on my team are up to.
"In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes or controls the work of subordinates or employees."
That's why it was called stand-up, in order to emphasise that you stand while doing it so the meeting simply can't be long since everyone is psychologically incentivised to get to the point so we can all go to break room, sit down and work, or get coffee.
Of course it didn't work out that way in many places, and now 'stand-up' is a 1 hour long daily meeting complete with minute notes, rules of proceedings, and slide-shows.
If you don't have a tool or an easy to update document that shows this at a glance, then you have a problem. If you are asking people to give you all this information and then trying to collate it, then you have a problem. If people are not very simply causing this information to be visible as part of their normal workflow, then you have a problem.
Meetings are not the solution to any of these problems. What meeting are good for is: Human contact. People often find that if they don't interact directly with someone that the other person might have important information that isn't being shared. The longer the time between contact, the more that irrational feeling grows. Not everybody feels that way. I don't and it took me years before I realised that it is hugely important for other people.
The best thing I can say is that, if you don't have a short meeting where people can fist-bump, eventually someone on your team is likely to go crazy and cause huge problems. Usually that person is your manager, as it turns out.
My advice is to treat any substantive conversation in standup as being something to be fixed. You don't want that. You want people to show up, complain about how boring standup is and disappear. Every time you find important information showing up in standup, ask yourself how it could have been shared more easily as a normal part of the work flow. Keep working at it and eventually standup will be all fist-bump and no content.
You know what perpetuates people not taking the meeting seriously? Having a 10 minute meeting every day just for fist-bumps.
Or sometimes you just really don't care.
Agreed. Hearing about the minutiae about someone's task is tedious. To me the daily scrum is like getting home and asking your significant other "how was work today?". Boring question, boring answer.
I definitely prefer the asynchronous approach. That way if I don't care about what you're working on (or vice versa), we don't need to waste time standing in a room together.
If you can't learn from what they're saying, don't need to know it, and can't contribute, then you shouldn't be there. This is why we use feature crews as a subset of the team.
If part of my work depends on theirs, or requires specific coordination, I'll use whatever mutually agreeable medium to exchange the information that is needed.
I've never really felt like I didn't know what people on the team were working on, despite not having a daily meeting or weekly status.
I don't get the blockers thing either. If I'm blocked, you're getting an email or IM immediately. I'm not going to wait until the weekly status email, or even the next day, to tell you. And I'm not going to bother the people who can't do anything about it.
But understand the hesitation. And if someone is blocked, agreed, it should result in a quick email or IM. Of course, if you spent all day yesterday trying to figure something out but are just feeling kind of stuck, standup call is a great place to say, "hmmm, I can keep working on this, but if someone has some time, I could sure use a second brain to help."
- Quick, 5 to 10 minutes
- Strictly focused on current status and blockers,
- Attended only by people who are directly working on the same project.
- Has someone designated to run the standup, who is empowered to table any discussions that start to drift.
(We work in teams of 4-6 and standup is never more than 10 minutes. I've also had the "30-minute standup" which not really a standup...)