Are standup meetings really worth it?
I've been working in an Agile setting where there are daily standup calls or scrum meetings.
For async communication, my environment also has a standup management tool.
I was curious about what independents thought about the standup management eco system.
Really helps track progress and issues when the product is iterating rapidly
Daily stand-ups can be great, but I think they are often overused and badly run. As someone else commented, any meeting is only worth it if participation is done well and it provides value to the participants. Stand-ups can be a great way to keep a team coordinated, but there are other methods too.
Since I've started working more asynchronously, I find myself doing fewer daily stand-up meetings and doing daily updates in written form instead, either via chat or sometimes in basecamp. It removes a meeting and is better when people are in different time zones.
Hello, Oligibson. So, as you indicated, writing standup helps? Is it also done only by you or by your entire team?
It's done by the whole team. For example, we might ask each day, “What did you work on today?” and everyone in the team will respond in the thread when they have time to.
Sometimes we also do weekly or monthly update questions like “Learned anything new lately?” or "What could we fix that would make the biggest improvement to your work?"
Hi Sagar,
In my experience, it works great at the beginning of the product cycle, however, especially in our modern world with many remote working, it becomes less valuable later on.
Hey Veryayskiy
How you manage daily standup at this moment ?
Slack channel :)
Hey Veryayskiy
Do you face any problems with Slack ?
Not really... I would say it's important to have some rules if you have a remote team.
And even more important to keep an eye on following those rules.
BTW, this could help a lot when your team is scattered and working remotely. This standup brings coordination and sync with every member of the team.
Hey Travelfreak
in this case, how you manage different timezones ?
However, there would be some common times when everyone would be able to be a part of it. Also, not everyone on the team would be in different time zones. That's really a rare-case scenario.
Yeah Thats great.
If your team working remotely, daily standup is one of the most important meeting to keep every members on the same page. Transparency is very important
Also daily Standup makes people to be more manageable or deliver based on own capacity
Indeed! For me, only 3 questions for every team members to address during standup:
What about mood? Often people add standups just because it's the formal practice within the company.
Absolutely - as long ad it doesn’t become a mandatory chore where people feel forced to do. The most effective version of a standup I’ve experienced is a simple async one via Slack.
Hey quiqueqs
How you track previous versions(last month) of your standup ?
If you use Slack (or a similar app), you have the entire history of the standup in there. You can keep it simple (couple of bullet points for what you're working on today) - good for visibility and people can comment on each other's progress if needed.
But, does that help to find how efficient particular person is ?
No. But that's not really the point of daily standups. You have standups to make sure everyone in your team is aware of what everyone else is working on, identify potential blockers, avoid people working over each other due to poor communication, etc. If you want to measure developer productivity, that's a whole different topic.
Thats sounds good, but how we can scale this thing ? Having 50 people doing the same exercise
You usually have team standups, not company-wide ones, so you could have a Slack channel for each team. Depends a lot on the type of company, size, etc., but usually at this size (~50 engineers), you probably have some sort of tech lead / engineering manager org. structure. It would be the responsibility of these people to make sure things get communicated across teams - so yes, in an ideal world, they would read everyone's status updates and surface any cross-cutting issues. But again, it depends a lot on how your teams are setup, etc., as this obviously doesn't scale to 100s of engineers/teams, but for a hypothetical team of 50 engineers with 5 tech leads, each leading 10 people, this setup works and is not too much of a hassle.
You mean groups including people, which has a leader to facilitate the audience
Any meeting is only worth if both participation and management are done properly. Standup is a quick and fast way to ensure that everyone is on the same page as far as the project is concerned and help can be quickly asked for and given.
But on the other hand, I have seen it descend into gossip.
So depends...
Hey kkumarkg
only extroverts speaks and introvert sits
true. hence " if participation is managed properly"
Yeah, manager needs to be pro active and make sure that every one follows the same routine
Daily standups may be excessive, but once-a-week standups seem to work for us. It's nice to hear/see the progress of projects and receive feedback from other team members.
Daily standups are required since they allow us to check daily blockages instead of waiting for them to appear in weekly meetings for remote team setup.