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Stand up is not easy to do well because people tend to abuse it a bit. It's ok if everyone briefly answers these 3 questions and moves on. 1 minute/each, no bi

by gedrap 12y ago

Stand up is not easy to do well because people tend to abuse it a bit. It's ok if everyone briefly answers these 3 questions and moves on. 1 minute/each, no big deal. I find it a bit useful when I am work on something totally unrelated to the rest of the team. The problem arises when someone abuses it and starts going into great irrelevant details about what they are going to do or did and carries on for 5 minutes. Everyone loses focus, gets annoyed or interrupted, time wasted. Same for managers who use it as a chance to discuss details with each member of the team. So all in all, little to be gained and 15-30min of time to be lost by everyone. Not worth it :)

BurningFrog 12y ago
It's the job of the manager to reign in the bores and braggards. Other can help too, of course.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
One of the ways I train stand-ups is having teams do fake standups. Everybody gets a card. Some cards just describe a couple of new things to report. Some cards provide instructions to destroy the stand-up. Things like "Ask a lot of questions when somebody else is talking" or "Ramble on for a long while about the story behind a problem you had" Then the team gets a chance to practice figuring out what's going wrong and fixing it themselves. No SM or outsider needed. Really 5 minutes should do it. 30-60 seconds for everybody there, no more than 7 people on the team. If you're going 10-15 minutes? Somebody is talking too much. Having said that, what I look for is a 3-minute standup that's over quickly -- and then folks mill about for another 10 minutes freely grouping and talking about the stuff they've just learned and how to fix it. This should be an emergent thing, and only happens when the team is working through a tough problem. If somebody is managing that process the standup ain't working right. Stand-ups are a purposeful interruption, but they should also be energetic, to-the-point, and a way to prevent folks setting up a bunch of stupid meetings to waste peoples' time even more.

by gedrap 12y ago

BurningFrog 12y ago

It's the job of the manager to reign in the bores and braggards. Other can help too, of course.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

One of the ways I train stand-ups is having teams do fake standups. Everybody gets a card. Some cards just describe a couple of new things to report. Some cards provide instructions to destroy the stand-up. Things like "Ask a lot of questions when somebody else is talking" or "Ramble on for a long while about the story behind a problem you had" Then the team gets a chance to practice figuring out what's going wrong and fixing it themselves. No SM or outsider needed. Really 5 minutes should do it. 30-60 seconds for everybody there, no more than 7 people on the team. If you're going 10-15 minutes? Somebody is talking too much. Having said that, what I look for is a 3-minute standup that's over quickly -- and then folks mill about for another 10 minutes freely grouping and talking about the stuff they've just learned and how to fix it. This should be an emergent thing, and only happens when the team is working through a tough problem. If somebody is managing that process the standup ain't working right. Stand-ups are a purposeful interruption, but they should also be energetic, to-the-point, and a way to prevent folks setting up a bunch of stupid meetings to waste peoples' time even more.