Hacker News Reader

Comment by madmax108 | Hacker News Reader

Standups are awesome when done right... but unfortunately, given that my team works fairly independently, standups end up getting stretched because some member of the team prolongs his/her update to get a team opinion on either a design issue or a technical problem (or a product issue).

The simple way we time-box our stand ups is by planking [1] while giving standup updates. This ensures each person speaks for <1 min. All other issues are discussed at the end of the standup. Better core strength is an unintended benefit of the same! :-P

[1] https://www.livestrong.com/article/538593-what-is-the-planki...

View on HN

Planking? SV culture is parodying itself at this point. That is truly ridiculous.

I love how you've automatically assumed we're based in Silicon Valley. Trademark HN armchair critiquing at it's finest!

To be fair, "SV culture" != "SV location".

That's were the Scrum master/Team lead/Manager interjects and regulates. When someone diverts from status update, I stop them and tell them to table it for discussion afterwards. There are no hard rules, once in a while, someone will have something that is very important and I'll let them drop it. Plank? Monkey business!

That's a creative solution (so long as you have no disabled/older/etc employees on your team)! You could probably solve the same problem, though, by just having one person who aggressively shuts down long updates. Phrases like "Let's chat about that offline" or "Want to grab a whiteboard for 15 after standup to figure that out?" are handy. Do this for a month or so and people will start self-policing effectively.

You'd probably want team buy-in before doing that, of course. If most people agree that standups are too long, you could get pre-emptive permission by asking the team if they're cool with you becoming the standup police like that. In my experience, most people are willing to admit that long standups are a problem, but only in retrospect - never when they're the one actively talking. :)

If there are questions on the stand-up organize for them another meeting or make a note and get back onto it later. The original stand up should only be a place where you can flag that you cannot meet your deadlines or you have problems. If it has to be discussed another meeting has to be organized only with those people who are related to that problems. Others should go back to their tasks after the stand-up. I know also it is not easy to do this but when this works you start to love to go to standups.

Does the person with the conch plank, or everybody else? Both seem effective....

Haha this is awesome

Reply on news.ycombinator.com