Stand ups are so old school
Every morning you wake up and run out the door to make it to your team’s stand up just in time. Some of you get into work much earlier. Either way you are dreading it. You’re barely awake and can’t recall what you did yesterday or you’re already in a flow and hate the disruption that’s coming. Welcome to the Stand Up.
Stand ups have always been about quick information exchange and that the team’s time is precious. You talk about what you did yesterday and what you’re planning for today. You might also bring up the fact that Little Bobby broke the build last night or that Little Debbie is blocking your progress. Quick reports happen and related conversations get pushed to a later time. It’s effective for quick data exchange but I’ve observed two unintended consequences: people can be indifferent to other people’s information and quality of the data can be lacking.
Let’s talk more about the indifference problem. Seasoned developers tend to follow up afterwards even if something is outside of their immediate scope but junior developers tend to focus only on their own work. Stand ups tend to reinforce the behavior of focusing only on one’s own work; unless you’re being blocked, you can actually tune out after you have your say. This doesn’t help with building a “product ownership” and collaborative mentality.
Next issue is the quality of the data. The emphasis on briefness encourages colleagues to be generic as much as possible (e.g. I fixed this bug with the form or I had meetings all day). Importance is placed on not wasting people’s time and in turn this makes it seem like team interaction is not an important aspect.
These two consequences are actually not caused by the stand up in itself; it’s actually the behavior of the people who participate in the process. I do think stand ups are impactful in providing quick status updates and surfacing blocking issues. Stand ups (and other parts of agile) do provide the infrastructure and process to maximize productivity. They’re the shell and skeleton of the product team organism but what about the people who are the organism’s muscles and tendons. What can we do to handle their behavior so that the organism as a whole is that much stronger?
What can you do?
First let’s address the stand up’s content quality. There’s an ad hoc nature to the physical stand up; very few people prepare their information for the stand up. People tend to organize their thoughts better when they have to write it down so why not replace physical stand ups with written information exchange. A simple app can be used to replicate a physical stand up. It’s purely for information exchange and it can even be augmented with daily reports from a source control (e.g. git) or issue tracker (e.g. jira) software. For example, a reporting mechanism can be set up that shows stand up data every morning:
To facilitate better communication, each bullet item can even include a way to start a conversation like below:
This might not solve the indifference issue but it takes away the “I can’t comment right now because we’re doing stand up” mentality. The team’s face to face time is lessened but mental blockers for discussions are removed. If the team misses the face to face time, I propose introducing Afternoon Tea Time. Take a break from the day and spend 10–15 minutes with your team for some tea and crumpets. You won’t regret it.
