Stand Up and Shut Up

(first published on October 21st 2013, migrated from my deprecated Wordpress site)

As with many simple and now commonplace “Agile practices”, debates still rage on about the Daily Standup (Scrum) meeting, a meeting which has somehow become a ritualistic signal that a team is “Agile” but is often an equally conspicuous signal of the exact opposite.

I’ve been in many organisations where God forbid anyone asks whether we should get rid of the meeting, or even change it, despite the fact that no one is getting any value out of it every single goddamn day*.

*Except some managers. A daily status update meeting? Terrific! The Daily Standup is an opportunity to micro-manage people every single day without having to approach their desks!

I digress. The point is, people still question the value of the Daily Standup and, if it is indeed valuable, how we might make it more effective.

I share the view of the Scrum Guide on this — at least in what the spirit of an effective Daily Standup meeting is, if not necessarily the prescribed format.

An effective Daily Standup meeting, for me, is one in which the team inspects and adapts both product and process.

That is to say it is an alignment meeting. A daily planning meeting. An opportunity to change our path if there is a better one. We do not have to (and should not) wait for the Sprint Review (product) and Retrospective (process) for this. Continuous improvement is about daily inspection and adaptation.

Here are some of the more effective questions that can be used in a Daily Standup meeting:

• How will we work together today to move toward our goal?
• What should we focus on today?
• What should we not do that we originally thought we would do?
• How will we remove this impediment right now?
• Given we are a little behind, how might we simplify this product increment?

It is about purposeful intent for the day. It is certainly not intended as a status meeting. If managers and others outside of the core team are not getting the information they require from conversations or the team wall then it will surely pay dividends to improve visibility and transparency in the way people interact while doing their work rather than have a daily status update meeting.

In fact, I would go as far as saying that the ritual of an unchanging Daily Standup meeting is usually a smell of poor collaboration in and between teams on the actual work to be done. Some companies mistake this meeting as a way of actually getting people to collaborate. It’s almost as if they think that the benefits of collaboration, as Agile promotes, can be gleaned simply by having this meeting.

Unfortunately it is not that simple. Standing (or sitting) people together does not make them collaborate.

Collaboration is an organic thing and only comes if the “way the work works” is designed to encourage it.

I sometimes see or hear the argument that, “because we’re Agile we should make the meeting fit with the way we currently work“, and that doing this will intrinsically make it more valuable. So, the argument continues, it’s OK if it becomes a status update meeting because that’s what the environment demands.

The issue with this approach is that the environment in which you currently operate is likely one of managers wanting status updates. One of traditional ways of doing things.

But in order to be effective with an Agile approach we have to do things differently. To think differently.

Agile does not mean “make compromises”. It is about mindful changes in the way we work to move toward improved effectiveness. If something feels a bit different and uncomfortable then it may well be a sign you are on the right track.

As coaches, we ought to let the team decide how they can get most value from a Daily Standup meeting. Then, rather than focusing all our attention on how to improve the meeting, we should instead be helping the managers create an environment in which actual collaboration (working together effectively toward common goals) is encouraged and starts to feel natural.

Where excellence, rather than dogma, can prevail.

P.S. Standing up is not mandatory! If the meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes then it will be quick regardless of whether you’re sitting down, standing up or doing the cha-cha.