Hacker News Reader

Comment by darxius | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly how we do things where I work. We're a pretty big team (about 12) and our standups are finished in 10 to 15 minutes. It's strictly time-boxed and we don't go over.

If you can't make it, we have a phone set up in the middle of the table for people to call in, or you can email someone on the team and they will say your standup for you.

View on HN

If this works for you it's awesome, congrats. But what I saw in the past (3 different companies) was more like 30m+ standups, because most people (funny enough especially project managers) tend to talk way too much during standups. Unfortunately.

Our team made Take-It-Offline flags that we'd wave whenever someone started going off track during standup. The change was immediate, standup time was cut in half. Now people don't even bring their flags, we just raise our hand or quietly say, "TIO!" Once standup's over, those that had items to TIO stick around and talk about them.

> project managers

There's your problem. That role is the antithesis of a self organising team. With someone responsible for "managing" that stand up turns into a very expensive way to keep the manager briefed.

True.

Had the same experience. They can't help turning it into a status report, and think it's a good show to talk a lot. PMs and Agile are hard to mix.

In Scrum that's where the Scrum Master comes in. It's their job to facilitate the meeting to ensure that those conversations are continued after the meeting.

A good team will often find ways to achieve these things without requiring the Scrum Master to step in.

Right, and that doesn't surprise me. However, this isn't a problem with standups, but a problem with people not understanding the underlying concepts or just wanting to look good to the team.

*edit: missed a word

Reply on news.ycombinator.com