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His Ugly and Bad aren't that bad! I'd be happy if those were my standups. Right now for me, the project managers own the whole event. You are asked for an upda

by jbob2000 7y ago

His Ugly and Bad aren't that bad! I'd be happy if those were my standups. Right now for me, the project managers own the whole event. You are asked for an update on a task that is on the project managers list, you give your update, and then he moves on to the next guy. There is only one developer in the meeting (me). The rest are QA, BA, Product Management, Delivery Management, and Change Management staff. The developers who work under me will get prodded randomly throughout the day by various other project managers for their updates. This is what happens when your company is "project oriented".

kristoff_it 7y ago
That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that you now know one (of the many) reason why a meeting can go wrong, and hopefully implement better procedures in a future job where you have the right leverage.
brutt 7y ago
It's called "status meeting". Usually, manager is not present at standup meeting at all, unless team asked him to participate.
- baroomba 7y ago
  I've seen a lot more status meetings going by the name "standup" than I've seen actual standups. A good clue is when there are people on totally different projects in the same "standup". If a lot of the people in the room are very unlikely to give a shit what most of the other people say for their part of the standup because they're not even working on the same things, that's a good sign you're actually in a status meeting. If someone's likely to get on your ass for being more concerned about surfacing blockers and communicating usefully with your actual team members than strictly following "yesterday I... today I will..." format, or folks are often getting "OK, but where are you at on X?" or "how much longer on Y?" follow-up questions from a PM or manager, not a direct contributor for whom X or Y is relevant, you're likely in a status meeting.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    IMHO a standup is a status meeting. If I were blocked I would have said so, not wait until the next meeting.
    - baroomba 7y ago
      Sure, in a sense, the difference being whether the form of the reporting is aimed at helping team-members coordinate or helping a project manager move a marker on a chart or otherwise send reports upward. Who's it for is the key concern and makes the difference in what your standups are like, and who directly benefits from them. Strongly agree that with certain teams you don't need a regular standup. That's part of why I think the decision to do a standup should be left to the team themselves, absent some clear dysfunction bad enough to require outside intervention. Otherwise you're probably just wasting everyone's time with 15+ minutes of boring crap that could just as well be a 2-minutes-to-write daily status update message or email to the project manager, assuming they can't get the status info they need out of Jira or git commits and skip the side-channel status updates altogether. I guess another major tell aside from "multiple unrelated teams are in the same standup" might be whether, if every single non-manager/PM quickly checks in with the rest and they all conclude a formal standup's not needed that day (or the entire week, or whatever), a standup either still happens or else someone (a PM or a manager, probably) gets really bent out of shape if it doesn't. If so, you're likely dealing with a regular ol' daily status meeting. And again, that's what a majority of "standups" I've seen have actually been. They're not for the team, and however they manage to occasionally serve the team members' needs is accidental—they're just micromanagement and "agile" box-ticking.
    - jophde 7y ago
      This x100. I'll never understand someone can do nothing about being blocked until the next standup in the age of Slack and open office floor plans.

kristoff_it 7y ago

That's unfortunate. The silver lining is that you now know one (of the many) reason why a meeting can go wrong, and hopefully implement better procedures in a future job where you have the right leverage.

brutt 7y ago

It's called "status meeting". Usually, manager is not present at standup meeting at all, unless team asked him to participate.

baroomba 7y ago
I've seen a lot more status meetings going by the name "standup" than I've seen actual standups. A good clue is when there are people on totally different projects in the same "standup". If a lot of the people in the room are very unlikely to give a shit what most of the other people say for their part of the standup because they're not even working on the same things, that's a good sign you're actually in a status meeting. If someone's likely to get on your ass for being more concerned about surfacing blockers and communicating usefully with your actual team members than strictly following "yesterday I... today I will..." format, or folks are often getting "OK, but where are you at on X?" or "how much longer on Y?" follow-up questions from a PM or manager, not a direct contributor for whom X or Y is relevant, you're likely in a status meeting.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  IMHO a standup is a status meeting. If I were blocked I would have said so, not wait until the next meeting.
  - baroomba 7y ago
    Sure, in a sense, the difference being whether the form of the reporting is aimed at helping team-members coordinate or helping a project manager move a marker on a chart or otherwise send reports upward. Who's it for is the key concern and makes the difference in what your standups are like, and who directly benefits from them. Strongly agree that with certain teams you don't need a regular standup. That's part of why I think the decision to do a standup should be left to the team themselves, absent some clear dysfunction bad enough to require outside intervention. Otherwise you're probably just wasting everyone's time with 15+ minutes of boring crap that could just as well be a 2-minutes-to-write daily status update message or email to the project manager, assuming they can't get the status info they need out of Jira or git commits and skip the side-channel status updates altogether. I guess another major tell aside from "multiple unrelated teams are in the same standup" might be whether, if every single non-manager/PM quickly checks in with the rest and they all conclude a formal standup's not needed that day (or the entire week, or whatever), a standup either still happens or else someone (a PM or a manager, probably) gets really bent out of shape if it doesn't. If so, you're likely dealing with a regular ol' daily status meeting. And again, that's what a majority of "standups" I've seen have actually been. They're not for the team, and however they manage to occasionally serve the team members' needs is accidental—they're just micromanagement and "agile" box-ticking.
  - jophde 7y ago
    This x100. I'll never understand someone can do nothing about being blocked until the next standup in the age of Slack and open office floor plans.