My thoughts on daily standup meetings

Clint posted a great blog entry recently on daily standups in Scrum. I thought I'd add some of my own thoughts on the topic.

 

To anyone who hasn't been doing these, the term “daily standup” probably sounds like one of those dang Agile Terms. Or worse yet, a Scrum Term. To be fair, it is. But it doesn't have to be. There's no reason for any such connotations of methodology.

 

Don't get me wrong. I'm an unabashed advocate of Agile practices. But in many companies there's still a sense of newfangledness associated with Scrum. For those in such an organization, I'm here to tell you that daily standup meetings are incredibly valuable and can certainly be methodologically agnostic.

 

I've introduced standups to teams using the following points:

• I want to know what's holding you up each day so I can address it quickly
• I don't want to waste your time so the meetings will be short – discussions can be held separately
• We'll meet as a team so everyone can keep tabs on the project as a whole

Notice there's no mention of Scrum, Agile, or any other label. I've found that laying out the purpose and format of the daily meetings in this way assuages many fears and misgivings such as You-Don't-Have-To-Check-Up-On-Me-Every-Day-You-Nazi, Meetings-Are-A-Waste-Of-Time, etc.

 

After we first get together I might introduce the idea of answering The Three Questions. To be sure, it's ideal if you're with a highly empowered team that only requires the facilitation of a Scrum master here. But in non-Scrum settings it's not the end of the world if you still have to lead the group by asking the questions yourself. In my opinion it's more important to get the information out there and hear each team member contribute to the data flow than to get hung up on enforcing the ideals of Scrum.

 

A bonus for you, the manager, is that you get a chance every day to work on your soft skills. There will likely be a spectrum of personalities present in your daily standup and not everyone will be outgoing and easy to work with. You'll probably have this guy in your group:

 

You: “Emil, what are you going to do today?”

Emil: “Bugs.”

 

This is your chance to improve your own communication abilities. Make sure you're picking up on who's more talkative and who isn't. See what you can do to form bonds and occasionally cajole a lengthier response out of ol' Emil. If you learn more about him and address some of his recent accomplishments (“Thanks for implementing the classic controller layout so quickly.”) you might eventually get a two-word reply.

The bottom line is that daily Scrum standups are a great thing when they are driven by an empowered team – the people are focused on the task at hand, they care about the group's progress, and you barely have to do anything as Scrum master to get the necessary communication flowing. But even if you aren't in an Agile setting, you can still easily implement daily meetings that encourage teamwork, improve communication, and provide you, the manager, with the transparency you need to track the team's progress.

New Wolf Diary entry -- Tuesday, November 28th

I hadn't really thought this through when I started resurrecting these diary entries, but now that the entry dates are almost aligned with the current date I'm starting to get a little confused. I can only imagine how befuddling that must be for you, the returning blog visitor. Or even you, the intrepid first time reader*.

So to be clear, the title of this post ("blah blah blah November 28th") refers to November 28th, 2006 -- the date on which I originally wrote the diary page in question.

It's funny to think of how the landscape of the industry has changed in just four years. Notice some of the names in the latest diary entry. Quake Wars was still in production. Z-Axis wasn't Activision Foster City or Underground or...um, nonexistent. id was a major player. Or possibly even a playah. Hard to say. I've never been the most appropriate person to make that distinction. Point being, things change. A lot. In subjectively little time. And with that, I've managed to make a seemingly profound observation that's really just a paraphrase of 2000-year-old Socratic thought. Way to go, me.

*according to this blog's Stats page, this is actually a rather small demographic. Size of 1, in fact. Here's looking at you, xxx.xx.xx.255 of Ottumwa, Iowa.

Last night's IGDA-Wisconsin chapter meeting!

I had a great time chatting with folks before and after the meeting, especially Jeff Spurgat, a programmer with whom I worked at Evermore Entertainment about 12 years ago! (We both did a, "Wow, has it been that long?" :)

The Raven chaps were predictably excellent hosts and it was good to see such a large turn out. We filled the main conference room then brought in 20 extra chairs and still had people out in the lobby.

While I enjoyed hearing Rob Martyn's assessment of the state of the games industry, I found John Bergman's talk to be most intriguing. He spoke on Guild Software's ongoing Android development for Vendetta Online, which is Guild's MMO title. Some of the points I took away from his presentation:

• While the hardware is similar to iOS platforms, there are more bundling opportunities with Android
• Tough to design UI for touch-based devices
• Likes Tegra as a development target, mainly due to NVIDIA's history of working with game developers
• Sees the mobile development war heating up in mid-2011

It turns out Guild Software is based in Milwaukee, apparently not too far from the hovel I rented while attending UWM. Keep an eye on Mr. Bergman and his crew. Thanks for the great presentation, John!

More of my IGDA LF notes on Gamasutra

I posted my thoughts on a synopsis of Marc Merrill's IGDA LF session. Check them out at Gamasutra.

Notes from IGDA, part 1 (John Vechey, Popcap Games)

As promised/threatened, here's the first installment of my notes from the various talks, seminars, roundtables of this year's IGDA Leadership Forum. It's lengthy, but there was a lot of really good material to comment on.

IGDA LF, November 4th, 2010

Notes from opening speech, John Vechey (founder, Popcap Games)

I'll admit to coming into this talk with minimal interest. I knew very little of Popcap aside from the most basic of common knowledge: they make high quality, polished games and they pretty much created the Casual Games space. My own ignorance makes that sound like a fairly dismissive summation, which is unfortunate, because that's kind of like downplaying the significance of the mathematician who told Descartes, “You know what? I know it'd be tough to draw, but you should have a third dimension.” Who was that guy? Oh, nobody really. He just invented the Z axis, that's all.

Like I said, I started off fairly meh but the more I heard John talk the more interested I became. I'm going to just throw out some of the statements Mr. Vechey made and give my two cents about each one. Maybe you already know all of these points, but it was all news to me.


A 20-person company turned down a $60 million offer to sell

This actually happened early on at Popcap. The impression I came away with here is that everyone at Popcap wanted to keep making fun and they didn't feel that would happen if they sold the company. Maybe it was a matter of timing, maybe it was the prospective buyer...I don't know. But here's how I read it: these cats were presented with the choice of instantly becoming millionaires or staying true to their vision for their company. And they chose door #2. Respect.


Popcap is now up to 375 people and has been around for a decade

OK, so how'd that “no, thank you, we don't want your sixty million dollars” thing turn out for them? Pretty darned well, apparently. I'm not enough of a Pollyanna to believe that they created a superior future for themselves by being idealistic – although the ability to remain true to your vision is, I think, an indicator of values that fertilize the soil of success. Rather, I think they also had some pretty great leadership, excellent execution, and a boatload of persistence.

Every game would be better if it included a social graph (a la Facebook)

This is a pretty sweeping statement, but John's example of Minecraft is tough to refute. Let's just say I'm not sold on the absolute nature of this comment, but Mr. Vechey knows a heckuva lot more than I do about it. So if I had to recommend paying heed to his opinion versus mine...

Stay connected with the customer

Really, I think there could be an entire lecture – or series of lectures – on this topic. There's a ton of information to discuss here and I'm only bringing you a poorly drawn snapshot of the tip of the iceberg. Games that maintain a connection with the customer on any and every imaginable level have a great probability of making the customer happy and enhancing the game developer's revenue. A very simple example would be providing a web game X that rewards an achievement after 30 minutes of gameplay. And that achievement gives you $5 of in-game credit towards items you can purchase in game Y. What has that done for the consumer? What has it done for the developer?


Item-buy is a better business model than $60 purchase + $20 (or even $5) DLC

This makes me cringe a little, since my background is almost entirely one of AAA development – an arena in which providing attractive DLC is considered almost critical to getting a project greenlit. Almost nobody in the AAA space stops making a game after they ship it.


“I don't poo-poo technology but I haven't seen a technology problem that hasn't been solved by smart engineers.”

I put quotes around that because I made a point of exactly recording John's words when I heard that statement. It's a bit nitpicky, and I hate to look like I'm stooping to the level of soundbite-reporting so prevalent in this day and age, but I took issue with this because Mr. Vechey made it appear as though any idea with perceived value should still be pursued if it only represents a technical hurdle. Coming from a project management background as I do this smacks of – as Spock put it – two-dimensional thinking. Now, obviously the Popcap leadership is no bunch of dummies. And I'm sure they have a history of employing some pretty great technical problem solvers. But as a general rule if you get hung up on pursuing something because it's only a matter of time until your programmers find a way to overcome the current obstacle you might be taking a beating on opportunity cost, damage to your production pipeline, or even your long-term milestone schedule. Bottom line: If you aren't getting it done quickly (or at least on time) then it's not just a tech issue, it becomes a production issue.


“If it's a great game, we should make it”

My favorite quote from the whole thing. Because Popcap's games have traditionally smaller development cycles it was troubling a particular dev that he was working on something that could take three years to come to market. The dev asked if his work was relevant and this quote was Mr. Vechey's response. John went on to say that they should still make a game even if it will have a limited audience with a limited revenue potential – if it's great. It's one thing for someone to say that if they're an indie with a day job or an idealistic hardcore gamer looking at the industry from the outside. But when that comes from the founder and VP of Corporate Strategy for a successful company? Wow. Just...wow.

Back from IGDA Leadership Forum in San Francisco

This was my first IGDA event and I had a fantastic time. Even on registration night the day before the opening seminar I started meeting really interesting and passionate people (shout out to mis amigos at Kaxan Games!). It's great to be able to chat with folks who have been fighting the same fight as you have but who nonetheless have different perspectives and experiences.

And let's talk about the opening seminar! The inimitable Ike Harris of Zynga and the exuberant Kim Sellentin of SEGA Australia did a great job of setting the tone with their joint talk on Scrum implementation at their respective studios. And as if that wasn't enough they let me tag along when they popped off to In n Out for late night burgers.

The social aspects of the event were, in fact, even more meaningful to me than the purely informative nature of the sessions. Breakfast with the incredibly friendly Clint Keith, chatting about project management consulting with the unmistakable Michael Saladino, and discussing the horrors of suburban snow removal with Adrian and Kevin from Vicarious Visions all had a lasting impact for me.

I should really post my thoughts individually on each of the seminars I attended, so I'll save a few of the details for later. Suffice it to say that for folks in management and leadership positions in the industry, the IGDA LF is a highly recommended event.

Wolf Diary -- November 27th

I hope all the PMG folks at Activision know I have deep and abiding respect for them and that I've enjoyed working with them for the past 12 years. Otherwise they might take some of the comments in the latest Wolf Diary entry the wrong way. Adam, Matthew, Kekoa, Brian...you know I love you, right?

Guys?