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You know who likes standups? Program managers, project managers, and useless middle-managers. What do they have in common? They get to exercise power and justi

You know who likes standups? Program managers, project managers, and useless middle-managers. What do they have in common? They get to exercise power and justify their existence through calling extra meetings like new project-specific standups. Who hates standups? Everyone else, basically. Really makes you think..

karatestomp 6y ago
I think this is more or less true. Present them as a tool to your team. Walk them through it for a week or three, maybe. If they don't want to keep doing it then one of 1) they don't want/need them, or 2) you have been bad at running/presenting standups, and in either case you don't need to be pushing them on the developers anymore.
schoolornot 6y ago
Yes, in my 10 year career I've so far encountered 0 competent "agile coaches" and two solid project managers. What made them solid? Their ability to put forth a minimal amount of effort to understand the work and actively remove political BS that prevented projects from being completed. Besides them two, I find the Technical PM field to be a colossal waste. During most meetings I often think, "Why do we pay this guy 100k to manage a Jira board and play planning poker? Where is he when I need him?" A wise colleague reminded me of this quote: "There's two kinds of people in this world when you boil it all down. You got your talkers and you got your doers. Most people are just talkers, all they do is talk. But when it is all said and done, it's the doers that change this world." Unfortunately, in this COVID age where Zoom after Zoom is accepted and everyone wants to "show their face" as to not get laid off, it's now prime time for the talkers. Every time I'm involved in a stand-up I feel everyone is pressured to blurt out randomness. Why not allow people to collect their thoughts for the week ahead and put it on paper/Slack/IRC?
the-pigeon 6y ago
I love standups. Been doing them for over a decade as a developer and lead developer. But a lot of people make the mistake of following someone's specific "agile" or whatever system for them. Every team is different and should evolve their processes around what works for that particular team. For me standup accomplishes a lot of great things. - Let's everyone know what everyone else is doing. Which let's us identify if two of us are working in the same area of code and address how to do so without creating painful merges. - Let's you know if someone is struggling to complete their work so you can figure out how to address (pair program, training, eliminating distractions for them, etc.) - Parking lot gives everyone on a team a daily time that everyone else will listen to them and think about their problem or idea. And my current team does our retros, planning, and any other meeting we can fit in immediately after standup. This compresses our meeting time down since having a bunch of scattered meetings is too disruptive for programmers as they need uninterrupted blocks of time to code during. This is entirely against the traditional spirit of standup but it works great for my team.

karatestomp 6y ago

I think this is more or less true. Present them as a tool to your team. Walk them through it for a week or three, maybe. If they don't want to keep doing it then one of 1) they don't want/need them, or 2) you have been bad at running/presenting standups, and in either case you don't need to be pushing them on the developers anymore.

schoolornot 6y ago

Yes, in my 10 year career I've so far encountered 0 competent "agile coaches" and two solid project managers. What made them solid? Their ability to put forth a minimal amount of effort to understand the work and actively remove political BS that prevented projects from being completed. Besides them two, I find the Technical PM field to be a colossal waste. During most meetings I often think, "Why do we pay this guy 100k to manage a Jira board and play planning poker? Where is he when I need him?" A wise colleague reminded me of this quote: "There's two kinds of people in this world when you boil it all down. You got your talkers and you got your doers. Most people are just talkers, all they do is talk. But when it is all said and done, it's the doers that change this world." Unfortunately, in this COVID age where Zoom after Zoom is accepted and everyone wants to "show their face" as to not get laid off, it's now prime time for the talkers. Every time I'm involved in a stand-up I feel everyone is pressured to blurt out randomness. Why not allow people to collect their thoughts for the week ahead and put it on paper/Slack/IRC?

the-pigeon 6y ago

I love standups. Been doing them for over a decade as a developer and lead developer. But a lot of people make the mistake of following someone's specific "agile" or whatever system for them. Every team is different and should evolve their processes around what works for that particular team. For me standup accomplishes a lot of great things. - Let's everyone know what everyone else is doing. Which let's us identify if two of us are working in the same area of code and address how to do so without creating painful merges. - Let's you know if someone is struggling to complete their work so you can figure out how to address (pair program, training, eliminating distractions for them, etc.) - Parking lot gives everyone on a team a daily time that everyone else will listen to them and think about their problem or idea. And my current team does our retros, planning, and any other meeting we can fit in immediately after standup. This compresses our meeting time down since having a bunch of scattered meetings is too disruptive for programmers as they need uninterrupted blocks of time to code during. This is entirely against the traditional spirit of standup but it works great for my team.