>> I just started writing a summary of our standups and told them they didnt have to do it individually any more,
>> it was appreciated and mgmt still get the info they need.
I'm skeptical that management would need a daily status.
I'm skeptical that management would need a daily status.
If you've got critical bugs live in production, "management" may be the ones ensuring all the hot potatos are in fact being handled by someone - that nothing is falling through the cracks, that everything is being addressed, that QA is on top of testing hot new changes that need to be rolled out ASAP. Daily isn't frequent enough in this context.
Burning through the QA backlog leading up to a big release in ye olde milestone driven waterfall style schedule? Daily might be frequent enough.
Long term feature work? Might be able to go weeks between updates - but a daily ping of "still working on X, still on schedule" takes what - 5 seconds to email, 5 seconds to read? Helps keep the mental burden of juggling everything in your manager's head down, maybe helps reassure them you're not going to pull a "so yeah, we've still got a month of work left at least" on delivery day when they're reporting up to their management. They might not be able to help you get your task done faster, but they might be able to rearrange other parts of the schedule to keep their stakeholders happy (e.g. X is running into delays, but we can give you Y ahead of schedule). Even if they can't do anything to help the schedule, they can start managing expectations ahead of time, prevent unseemly "surprises."
And hey, daily status reports are better than daily status queries.
Have a high-overview webpage where they can look it up by themselves if they need to. This is faster than daily and gives much better and accurate info. It's your task to communicate the metrics, scheduling problems, cost overruns and feature creep.
The thing is, it's all about visibility. Can management look at your sprint board, either physical or online, jira agile board for example, or in some other tool, where they can see what's going on? That's a good place to start.
Who keeps this up to date and well maintained? I see little fundamental difference between pushing metrics/status via JIRA and pushing via email. Both scale (or don't) just as badly. Both require distraction from your development tasks to properly estimate or summarize status/problems.
Don't get me wrong - keep the daily distraction the hell in check. But there's no magic bullet to make good communication free, and there are plenty of people and contexts where words and language work way better than attempting to abstract things with stats and metrics.
> This is faster than daily and gives much better and accurate info.
Maybe for you. Maybe for me. Definitely not for a lot of coworkers I've known. They do not context switch from "this is harder than I thought" to "track down the JIRA task and change my estimates". Getting some of them to even log work done is like pulling teeth. Hence hacks like the daily standup - poll, use words, get the real status.
They really have no idea what they're doing.
How are these deadlines getting set?