Please Stand Up

In agile they say that you should organize a daily 5 to 10 minute meeting to review status, discuss issues, and bring the team together (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-up_meeting).

My first piece of advice is don’t do it just because the methodology calls for it.  Just because someone is certified in scrum or the like doesn’t mean that this practice will actually help the team.

On too many occasions I’ve seen this turn into a plain ole status meeting where each person drones on and on about what they did yesterday and what they are doing today. Most likely you have a process in place to view tasks (kanban, jira, Azure Dev OPs, etc.) so what someone did and what they will be doing should be pretty apparent.

Some people don’t like speaking in large groups so this causes anxiety which is counter productive in what the meeting is supposed to achieve. When this is done with remote teams it’s even more painful because everyone is sitting on a Skype call and most are just “back grounding” the speaker anyway.

Having the stand-up as the first thing you do in the morning is also counter productive. Some of my greatest thinking is done in the morning, in the shower, or on the drive into work. The last thing I want to do is be side tracked when I have a flurry of ideas with a group discussion that I can’t possibly give all of my attention to.

If there are impediments that need to be discussed then bring up directly to the scrum master, lead developer, or whoever would be in charge of helping.  Discuss with the specific team members that can help come up with a strategy and then send an email or assign a task to the leader to solve the problem. With a public list of impediments / tasks for the management clearly visible then they will also be accountable and that task will be a dependency in completing your task.

Teams are not brought together by a shared and unified vision, not by forcing everyone to speak in front of a group. Remote teams are hard to manage, having people talk on the phone about their status is not going to bring them closer. Perhaps organizing the work so that multiple people have to work together to implement a feature, this fosters camaraderie.

If you are mandated by management to have this stand-up then opt to have it in the afternoon or during lunch. Treat it more like a coffee break as opposed to sidetracking everyone first thing in the morning. As the owner of the meeting be sensitive to those that are anxious about speaking in groups, coach them and try and help them to be less worried about what people will think about them.