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I'm seeing a lot of comments about how terrible different people's standup meetings are at their particular companies, and I can't help but think the problem isn't with standup itself, it's with these companies. At my job, we meet for standup via video chat as early as we can. That's about 9am for some of us and 10am or 11am for others depending on timezones. We each say what we worked on yesterday and what we're working on now, which only takes about 5 to 10 minutes, then we enter what we call "parking lot." We call it "parking lot" because if this were an in-person meeting, this is bit where we would be talking in the parking lot on our way out to lunch. No one is expected to stick around unless there's something urgent related to what your working on that needs to be discussed. Anyone is free to hop off the call at this point. During parking lot, we discuss impediments, anything that's going to keep someone from getting work done that day. If the problem is something complicated that's difficult to describe via text, we chat about it face to face and work out a solution together. If the problem is simple, we just agree to talk it out in either a public or private channel on Slack depending the kind of problem. The purpose of the meeting isn't to build a big report of who's working on what or to guilt us into working harder. It's just to guarantee that we're all online at a given time each day to help each other out. Working across several timezones, we all have wildly different hours, and without standup, we would probably be waiting for days to hear back from each other about any issues we run into. Maybe standup is a problem for other people or other companies, but for my team at least, we couldn't work without it. |
