Read on for some tips and a free resource!
As a project manager for Ekohe, I work in a co-working space with several other agencies and startups in Paris. Our Ekohe France team does a stand-up every morning and inevitably, we get asked,
“What is stand-up?”
In Agile project management, a stand-up is a brief daily meeting at the start of each day for team members to share their progress and assigned tasks on their projects. Also known as a daily scrum, round-up, or roll-call, stand-up meetings allow for regular communication within a team, and yes, we do actually stand up!
Why stand-up?
To keep everyone on their toes! No, really, it’s so that we remember to keep the meetings short and productive. It’s not about having a thorough discussion, but rather a way for team members to touch base with each other and provide their progress. If there is a blockage on a task, those relevant to that task can schedule a debrief later.
These daily meetings encourage communication, which is crucial to software development. Another benefit is that it fosters a team environment. With everyone’s participation, we really get a sense of the group effort required for each project. Using stand-up enables us stay to focus on each day’s tasks and encourages peer-to-peer accountability. By announcing your tasks for the day, you’ve made a commitment to complete those tasks. And this, in turn, helps keep your project on schedule.
How do we stand-up?
At Ekohe, we created our own internal tool back in March 2015 to conduct our stand-ups. Before this tool, a designated member would type out notes as everyone was speaking. What should have been a 5-minute stand-up lasted 20 minutes. With this tool, people were able to record their tasks themselves and they are automatically posted on the screen.
The team member logs in with the company email, lands on today’s date, and can type in the task for the project he or she selects. Since it’s a real-time web app, everything gets updated instantaneously and other members can see this information if they have stand-up open on their computer (especially helpful for remote teams). We can select past dates and see what we’ve worked on. This keeps us organized and maintains transparency within our team. There’s even a presentation mode if you’re using a projection screen. You can easily scroll through and share what’s been completed and what is on today’s to-do list for the project.
How do you stand-up?
- Decide on a set time and space to do stand-up every day
- When stand-up time arrives, call team members to the designated area
- Stand up (seriously!)
- Pick a person to start and have them respond to the following questions:
1. What did I finish yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. Am I facing any impediments?
- Keep it short! If more detail is required, agree to debrief with the relevant team members after the stand-up
This format is ideal for smaller development teams or for stand-ups that are project-specific. For larger organizations where you might review several projects, it may be better to go over the tasks by project rather than by person. You may have a project leader to lead the stand-up if you’re reviewing the progress by project than by person.
Feel free to use our stand-up tool and share with us how you stand-up. Simply log in with your Google email and you’re ready to go! Users with the same domain name will automatically appear with the same team.
Ekohe is a web and mobile development agency specializing in Ruby on Rails and native mobile languages. Follow along for more tech-related resources and content in the future.
