Stop treating it like one.
A perfect standup:
- What are you currently working on or about to start.
- What intermittencies do you have with other people/projects
- What Blockers or Impediments are you up against.
That’s it. Short, Sharp, Snappy.
The standup is there for your team to work together, not for you to stay in control of everything that is happening. There are better ways to do this.
Your team members have lives
Between the school runs, the doctors appointments, bad traffic or the dog eating your homework, people have lives outside of work. holding your standup at 8:30am is guaranteed to have absentees every other day and you begin to lose the benefits of your daily standup in the first place.
When to hold your standups?
Your only answer of when to hold a standup is to gain full agreement from every member of the team. suggest reasons why we don’t hold them first thing in the morning. then get everyone to agree.
I recommend suggesting times between 10am and 2pm.
Quarter to x is a great time for a standup, people have meetings staring on the hour and makes sure the standups are short, sharp and snappy. Give it a go, and don’t be scared to change time if it is not working for your team.
Holding remote Standups.
I heard a fantastic solution to a fun problem. half of your team is working from home and having differing levels of engagement create challenges of their own.
Enter a simple rule. If one person is calling in remote to the standup, Then everyone is calling in remotely.
This puts everyone on a level playing field and gets the same level of engagement from everyone.
Amazing solution I cannot wait to trial this one out.
When to take things ‘Offline’
A great standup will bring to light issues and challenges that the team need to handle. you need to facilitate this out of the team members, and give them a little time to discuss back and forth the highlights of the issue.
Once highlighted it is time to interrupt, letting them know to take the discussion offline. The great teams I have worked with are great at this and often stop the conversation themselves, keeping the whole standup in flow.
If you find your standups taking longer than 15 minutes, you are probably letting these discussions run away. big waste of time for all other members. Rein it in.
If you need a status update
Perhaps you don’t have an open and transparent workplace/team? Or perhaps your team members are very autonomous, whatever works for you, your team and your organisation. I would suggest working through other methods of getting the status update you require. A short meeting/update in a one on one capacity can often be the best method. this also gives everyone a great opportunity to cover off many other issues at hand, perhaps a disruptive issue or some large blockers or maybe the team member wants to ask for some help or upcoming time off. Standup is not the time for any of this nor is it conducive to people opening up to issues in front of the whole team.