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.