>> The daily standup deserves a blog post of its own. This religious ritual has become a staple of every team in the world. Ten minutes of staring into the void

>> The daily standup deserves a blog post of its own. This religious ritual has become a staple of every team in the world. Ten minutes of staring into the void, talking about what you did while no one else listens, because they were in the middle of something five minutes ago and will go back to it in another five minutes, and waiting for everyone else to finish. I've had this happen my times while I was leading the project - it bugs me. I've ended up reducing daily standups and replacing with walking around (physically and virtually) and chatting with people and getting similar results. Of course, "similar results" here is that I heard what someone had to say but nobody else did - so a key to this walking around approach is to tell each person what other people are doing in order to connect the dots. On the surface this might seem terribly inefficient, but there are a lot of positives, biggest of which is building good relationships with team members and learning about all the other little things going on in life. On the down side, for people who are only part time on my team (not uncommon in my bigco setting) there is extra scheduling effort and discipline required to make these chats happen frequently.