What is standup and why do we call it that?
Standup is an agile technique that was designed to get everyone aligned - usually once a day. Some other common names for this include "daily", "sync", and "scrum".
Most agile teams use one of two variations, "round robin" and "walk the board", to get a glimpse into the current status of the project.
The reason the name "standup" has stuck is that many teams will literally stand for the duration of the meeting as a way to encourage everyone to keep it short - usually less than 15 minutes.
Stand up meetings aren't just for software teams anymore. Take 5-10 min each day to sync up and plan ahead. Here's instructions, tips and variations.
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Why most folks don't love standup
Standup as it is commonly practiced has become rote, repetitive, and thanks to modern project management tools... redundant.
Be honest, how easy is it for you to zone out while people rattle off their todo list when it largely doesn't impact you? This is how most people feel in standup based on the years of feedback I've received.
Most of us are just waiting for our turn to speak and our brain is hibernating otherwise.
Other feedback I've received (and experienced) is that if you, as an individual contributor, are expected to update a board with every item you are working on then a status update is essentially reading a diff of that board to your team.
This feeling of "proving what you did" and "showing what you will do" lacks trust - especially for established teams. For most contributors it says I didn't see you yesterday but... pop quiz... are you working on the right things today? As a leader, this is not a message you want to start every day with.
With the above sentiments taken into account, I often hear that standups do not yield 15 minutes worth of valuable insights and therefore its hard to justify disrupting a whole team's time for it. This can lead teams to experiment with async standups or skip the process altogether.
In my experience, async standups are, often times, even worse. Now, rather than reading the board out loud, you need to write down a summary of what changed. Many project management tools have this built in and if not, its incredibly easy to automate so why are we asking our teams to do this for us?
If you work with engineers and they know something could be easily automated and its not, they get frustrated. Layer in that this could-be-automated message has an undertone of micromanagement and you have a ticking time bomb of resentment.
What about that other format I mentioned at the top - "walking the board"?
Walking the board can be more useful, but without a plan it is quite literally like reading a slide deck to your audience. What value are you adding that they could not have added on their own? If you are going to get an entire team together, you need to be consciously adding value to each and every person's day.
How to make standup feel valuable to everyone
The most important question to answer is:
What matters today and why?
If you can answer that clearly and succinctly in front of your team, that alone justifies a message being sent out but perhaps not another meeting on the calendar.
After years of leading standups I can confidently say this question can never be answered frequently enough, loudly enough, or clearly enough. Most teams have a machine gun of priorities, requests, fires, and more being shot at them throughout the week. Having someone in a leader role clearly articulate the #1 priority of the team (or each individual) is always appreciated, even if it was assumed or guessed correctly.
How to tailor a standup to your team
For a complete guide, check out The Standup Playbook.
How to find the most effective format for the challenges your team is facing today
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