[Ayaz]

Standups, when done with discipline, bring in a lot of insight and prove helpful for everybody in the team. I use Assembla at work which offers a standup module, which asks the three customary questions. My problem is getting my team to regularly fill those up. I have personally reminded them several times. I have created an automated bot which checks who hasn't added a standup for the day and reminds them on HipChat. Despite that, people just don't do it with regularity. I should think this is a common enough problem that most teams/organisations face. I'm interested in what they use to tackle it.

[tomc1985]

I find this kind of thing dehumanizing.

Daily, repeated form-filling is hard for creatives. Never heard of Assembla but if you were my manager and you were repeatedly needling me to fill out some form, every day, when I'd rather just give you a few words over chat (or in person)... I would most definitely push back.

[Ayaz]

I understand what you mean. However, if you personally have to ask every individual every day 1) what they did, 2) what they will do next, 3) and what impediments they have, and you can't get them to do it without your having to ask (in my experience, they'd do it for a few days, slow down, and then stop again), the more efficient way seems to me is to automate it.

Of course, in my case, I didn't wake up on the first day and put this in place. I spent a few months trying to get people to send in their standups every day, but realised that I can't possibly do it everyday with an expanding team and it didn't make for the best use of my time. Because filling in your standup is a quick part (quick because it shouldn't take you longer than five to ten minutes to fill it up) of the process that needs to be followed, the most efficient alternative was to create a bot to remind those who can't remember to do. Plus, the number one reason I got from people who failed to do it was that they simply forgot.

[dilemma]

Why do you need to ask everyone about everything everyday? That's called micromanaging. Their non-compliance is a message.

Try trusting them instead.

Signed, Micromanagee

[Ayaz]

Is it really micro-managing? Isn't it the point of standups in Scrum, to find out what an individual in a team has been working on and what issues they are facing in order to make more efficient use of their time and skills as well as to clear impediments in their way? The end goal is to improve the team's performance.

If I was telling them what to do, what results to expect _and_ how to do it, then I would be micro-managing.

[douche]

Ideally, what people are doing should be obvious, if they are actually doing work. Check-in messages, issue tracker activity, etc, gives a more real picture of what is actually happening than the copy-pasted no-information answers presented through stand-ups generally.

Don't Lumbergh your way through it - "So, Peter, what's happening? Aahh, now, are you going to go ahead and have those TPS reports for us this afternoon?"

[depr]

Micromanaging includes closely observing, and not just controlling, an employee.

If the point of standups in scrum are to find out what an individual has been working on, every day, then this could feel like micromanaging to some people.

[Ayaz]

That is an interesting observation. For me, closely observing would translate to nagging individuals several times a day about what they are doing as well as how they are doing something.

The end goal of standups, the way I understand it, is to figure out what people in your team are doing and what they are stuck at in order to:

* align people towards individual goals in the sprint that require collaboration; * remove impediments that are beyond the control of team members and that may cause delays; * improve task and load distribution, so that some members aren't overburdened while others are slacking off (if you run a short sprint and give team member autonomy to work, tasks that require collaboration from several team members can tend to become bottlenecks, as I have experienced).

I suppose you could well call it micro-managing if these standups were used to manage individuals instead of the process. In my view however, standups help you gather data to manage and improve the process, so as to make things favourable for the team.

[a_small_island]

Top line of wikipedia:

"In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes or controls the work of subordinates or employees."

[xyzzy4]

If you automate it, it shows you value your time more than than their time.

[humanrebar]

Have the bot revoke access to the things people do instead. Reset LDAP credentials or something. As long as it's a very quick and easy process to get access restored.