Are stand-ups (meetings) getting mainstream?
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
The day-boundary is arbitrary. It encourages someone who gets stuck on something at 2pm to spend the rest of the day banging on it and bring it up tomorrow. Or, in better functioning teams, we deal with it at 2pm and the standups become irrelevant. That was what I found.. is that as a team lead I knew what everyone was doing before we met in the morning. Another popular tendency is to pull in PM, or maybe my boss.. but then I get to waste 6 people's time trying to communicate what's happening to them on a still-arbitrary schedule.
On bad teams, it's not going to help, and it will eventually become a source of irritation and resentment.
On good teams (which are humming along just fine, thank you), the process becomes an irritation and a resentment.
Two other unfortunate things happened at one place that were I guess more a sign of dysfunction than a problem with stand ups per se. First, there was an arms race of "what I did yesterday" type descriptions that turned stand ups into a 30-minute production. Second, our manager had a habit of calling people out in the meetings in front of everybody (!). It created a stressful situation where people rambled on about nothing at length every morning. Stand ups were probably the least desirable part of that job.
The most value I've found in standups are when you have a cross functional team that can communicate status on different things to everyone all at once. BAs, QAs, devs, IM/PM, and product owners aren't all going to stay up to date with each other naturally on most teams.
Of course, if teams are working in very long iterations with out-of-cycle QA then each functional aspect of the team staying up to date with each other on a daily basis yields less value. Such a setup tends to bring about other problems in many scenarios though.
In the end it's all about context. To say a daily standup is a stupid practice without context (implying in any context) is a bit too broad of a statement IMHO.
1. In general, I'd like to receive information asynchronously. Meetings should be for solving problems. They're a team-mutex, and mutexes should be avoided.
2. Standups are generally by definition, not for solving problems.
Standups aside, sure, ssync information is good. However, it's not nearly as rich as face to face communication.
I'm not sure why you say meetings should be for solving problems. The majority of my meetings are about sharing information and planning. I solve problems at my desk.
What if you had a team dashboard, minimalist in style. It had a selection whereby you could choose one of 3 status for how your efforts were going: Red, Orange, Green.
At a certain time, you are prompted to pick one of the 3 status.
All team members pick their status - and the lead gets a weighted summary of overall status. If too many orange/red status are selected the team meeting gets called - if more green/orange then he can choose to defer, if mostly green then it says no meeting necessary.
You'll never know what other members pick and, by default, the lead wont know who picked what (unless he wanted to audit).
This would be an non-intrusive method of polling the team, without risk, as to whether or not a meeting was required.
I think that's a dysfunction that should be repaired, not institutionalized.
A meeting may only be 10 minutes long but the loss of productivity is likely going to be significantly higher. Employees will need to page out[1][2] what they've been working on -- a very expensive process.
Managers should be ensuring that employees have quick and easy access to information of relevance on demand, rather than on an arbitrary time scale. Issue tracking software (web based for simplicity) allows teams to view and contribute to the big picture at a time that works best for each employee. These systems require full time staff to actively maintain them. Typical duties could include sorting and filtering information (via way of updating fields on an issue), creating links between issues to aid planning and discoverability, correcting mistakes, ensuring consistency and monitoring usage to implement improvements (particularly simplifying and automating the system).
This isn't a disguised plea for ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems because it focuses on the users (employees) getting their work done -- not rigid and inflexible processes for the sake of standards compliance. Most quality management approaches I've come across fail because they are burdensome to getting real work done. They're not user friendly. They're typically rigid and deterministic in design where the actual work is flexible and probabilistic. Users are left wondering how their use of the system actually helps the project -- there is no clear link. Tedious manual work is required where an automated approach could be implemented. The systems become too complex for anyone to comprehend. Coming back to the paging[1][2] analogy, users run out of working memory before they get a chance to input or retrieve data to/from the system -- it's all wasted on deciding[3] which button from 50 needs to be pressed.
Human interaction factors and cognitive science are crucial to this discussion. It is disappointing to read that many companies are blindly accepting stand-up meetings as common practice without consideration to the well established science behind organisational communication/teamwork.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97953 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue
I've had better results where: A) frequency of team meetings increases as deadlines get closer, going from once per week to 2x per day if needed. B) every day managers spend 5-10 minutes of 1-on-1 time with each team member actually inspecting their work.
It works for us, although sometimes the meetings can be a drag when the day before you spent a lot of time in meetings and you don't have a lot of input. It is one way of kinda putting you on the spot if you aren't producing anything which keeps people accountable.
I don't particularly like them because I don't really care what 20 other people have been working on yesterday, and we generally unblock ourselves immediately instead of waiting for next day's meeting, so that's not helpful either.
This just makes it worse.