> not helpful is when standups are treated like status reports
> simply state what you’re doing
Honest question, what's the difference.
> simply state what you’re doing
Honest question, what's the difference.
As someone who did sales early in my career... acting off of a script correctly feels like a casual conversation to the one you're selling to.
If your script-reading is bad, that's because you haven't practiced enough. Having a script isn't necessarily a bad thing, and is in fact very useful in keeping focus.
Every meeting you have with people has a goal (otherwise, you wouldn't meet with them to begin with!!). Maybe the goal is to gather requirements, or maybe the goal is to convince them to do something for you. The latter is 100% sales. None of us exist within a vacuum, we rely upon APIs or libraries or frameworks to do things. And if these APIs / libraries / frameworks are company / organization specific, you'll need to convince their lead engineer that your change is worthwhile to adapt.
Either way, standups is just one communication strategy. Pick the communication strategy that works with the style your team feels comfortable with. There's rarely one solution fits all when it comes to communication.
What you want from "what you did yesterday, blockers, what you will do today" script is a framework for conversation starter, conversation scope and having something that you can prepare before. Some people can come up with it on the spot and some people think they should come up with it on the spot.
That is why I hate having standup right at the start of the day like 9.00, I usually have to get at least 20 mins to get check up what I finished yesterday and start picking up something new, going through priorities.
Fully agree I would prefer it later. Not just 20min, I typically start ~1h before ours anyway, but it hangs over me all that time. I'd like to spend most of the day working on something and then stand-up in the afternoon, I'd be more likely to have an issue someone could help me with, or otherwise on my mind to discuss.
Status report is when a team say the same things every day and every week, nothing changes and there's nothing new to be learned. This is Waste.
Daily scrum is meant to encourage collaboration, inspiration and brief sharing of information. However, when driven by business needs alone, it becomes another pointless status report. On the flip side, if daily scrum takes off, it should be allowed to continue as a new meeting afterwards, but is also a sign that there's not enough coherency in the group with the current practice.
Scheduling it daily is how you have these casual conversations.
If you're just cargo-culting having a daily 15-minute meeting under the guise of agile or whatever, and it's just a status meeting, then cancel it, until after people learn to have a proper stand-up. Waking up just to go to a meeting and report "I'm still working on the thing", is a waste of everyone's time, and is a meeting that would have been better off as an email. (Provided people can send that email, which is not always possible, and is an entirely different topic.)
this would kill the meeting at my company, it would go off the rails as a thing that everyone is present for and listening to. Moving it "offline" - as is often done - only occurs once it has gone sufficiently off the rails in the first place. Not saying there's anything wrong with this process, just pointing out it's counter to the "keep it short" discussion happening in this thread.
state what you are doing = what happens automatically if you sit in the same office with other programmers: you know what they are working on, you know if they are stuck with something because they usually just ask aloud, etc.
Standups really improved that aspect for me.