How we managed to save time in our daily stand-ups
The setup
I recently started leading the daily stand-up meetings of our Operational Excellence engineering team. The plot is simple: every one of us informs the team about our progress from last time and what we will work on until the next meeting. Stand-up is up there with the most important meetings, as this is the time and place to share our successes and failures.
Once a person finishes talking, he “passes the ball” to a person of his choice.
We usually have 7 or 8 participants, but sometimes it can grow to 10 if some people from outside our engineering team join. The team has 15 minutes to share the progress. It usually works, but we can overshoot the designated time when we have more people.
Measuring useful time
Not long before taking over, we noticed something interesting.
In many cases, choosing the next person could have gone smoother. Of course, if you go first, you have plenty to choose from. But as more and more people have talked, the following situations started arising:
- the speaker could not decide whom to choose;
- the speaker was not wholly aware of who had already spoken and who had not;
- the next speaker was not prepared and was looking for the unmute button in Zoom (or even worse, looking for the Zoom window itself);
- the speaker joined late and was unaware of who was left;
- the speaker nominated a non-present member.
We made some measurements, and it turned out that, on average, we spent more than a minute trying to decide who would come next. On worse days, it was almost 2 minutes. That could be better, as it takes 10%+ of the designated meeting time.
Not even speaking of the fact that we rarely start the meeting precisely, as we have to wait 1 or 2 minutes for those who join late for various reasons. (Of course, we are precise people, so it can only be because of other meetings.)
This results in a net meeting time of about 10 minutes. That is already 33% less than intended.
The solution
Having realized the time loss, we thought of possible solutions — what if we don’t have to decide who’s next but implement a fixed order?
That could work, but that takes away all the spontaneity and probably will make our meetings more boring, which is different from what we want from a meaningful discussion.
So we created a simple application that lists all the possible participants. At the beginning of the meeting, the leader selects those who join, hits the shuffle button, and voilà — we have a random order in which everyone knows who has talked and who hasn’t.
The result
The result was immediately palpable. Even though we had the same number of participants as in the previous meeting, we finished 3 minutes earlier! That is a great start.
But it wasn’t perfect. People need to get used to it. We weren’t accustomed to not nominating the next speaker, and it caused slight delays in the next person starting. No biggie, it will change, we reassured ourselves.
The feedback for the new format was predominantly good, so we were happy to keep it and implement it even better.
Refinements
Despite the success of this new method, we immediately noticed something.
Displaying the list of all upcoming speakers can come hand-in-hand with a possible issue: those further down the list might subconsciously switch off and only pay attention once their turn comes. Or even worse, they might treat that waiting time as a free toilet break. That is, of course, not the point of this list — it’s the exact opposite.
So what could be a better solution?
Let’s not display more information than the current and the next speaker’s name. In this case, no one knows how much they will have to wait, keeping everyone on their toes.
We decided to display the next speaker’s name only because this gives them time to prepare, and we can avoid unnecessarily long pauses.
Result — round 2
Following this refinement, the time we can shave off our meeting is even more than we expected. There are times when we finish 6–7 minutes earlier.
A shorter run time does not mean we don’t share the info we need; everything still works as intended but much quicker. We even have time for non-engineering members to share their opinions or questions or have someone present something useful at the end of the meeting.
We are also happy that the initial hiccups have disappeared, everyone has gotten used to the new format, and there are rarely pauses between speakers.
Future
Ideas keep popping up on improving or modifying the application to suit us better. I don’t think we’ll be able to chip off further time and still have a meaningful discussion.
Other areas that we could improve are, for example:
- showing a timer in the beginning as a hard limit to how much we wait for late joiners
- implementing a speaking time limit in which the speaker shares strictly their updates, and attendees can discuss solutions/suggestions at the end after everyone’s turn is up
- not showing the upcoming speaker’s name to keep everyone on their toes even more, although this might result in longer waiting times as they don’t have time to prepare, unmute themselves, and so on.
Conclusion
We had fun creating this little application for my team, and I am excited by its potential and the positive result.
Of course, this isn’t a silver bullet; it might not work with every team at every company. But if your team is open to it, you should give it a try.
References
Get the app’s source code here: https://gitlab.com/taager-com/operational-excellence-stand-up
