[taterbase]

An excerpt from the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.

Status Meetings Are About Status

A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together. The purpose of the meeting is to reach consensus. Such a meeting is, almost by definition, an ad hoc affair. Ad hoc implies that the meeting is unlikely to be regularly scheduled. Any regular get-together is therefore somewhat suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Though its goal may seem to be status reporting, its real intent is status confirming. And it’s not the status of the work, but the status of the boss.

When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of one organization, for example, that runs daily two-hour status meetings. When participants are off-site during a meeting, they are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone for the whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and is subject to serious penalties.

[lucisferre]

Generally speaking, it is important for a well functioning team to have a status and sync-up meeting. When well run, it provides a way to batch what could end up being lots of individual ad-hoc interruptions throughout a week to a single point.

Again, generally speaking, no one should have more than one of these meetings a week unless they really have a good reason to be actively involved in multiple independent teams.

The real meeting-smell is when people have lots of weekly recurring meetings. If you're not a manager then two would be expected for most people, a 1hr team meeting and a 30min 1-1 with whomever they report.

[paxys]

I disagree. Most status meetings are useless at best and harmful at worst. If there really are blockers then people should be raising them immediately, not up to one full week later in the next scheduled sync. And if all blockers are addressed promptly as they should then what is the point of a delayed status update?

Like the parent post mentions these kinds of meetings are for the benefit of managers and executives, not people working on the project. And this validation shouldn't come at at the expense of everyone else's time.

[Kaytaro]

Not every issue/question/complaint is an immediate blocker. Status meetings are great to queue topics or issues that do not need to be immediately addressed but if left ignored too long could snowball into a more serious thing.

[crent]

Don’t you think that blockers affecting long term timelines will have ripple effects for higher level planning? Not everyone involved in that communication will be clued in to the day to day messages.

[yamtaddle]

If status isn't being communicated well enough through general chatter and the multiple status tracking tools ("what do you mean, multiple?" everyone almost certainly uses at least Git and some kind of issue tracker, and it's not Git's main purpose but that definitely should convey some amount of status-related info) we're supposed to use daily, for the project manager to have what they need with nothing more than a couple impromptu "hey, what's up with X?" questions to the right people per week, something's seriously fucked up.

Granted, more often than not, something's seriously fucked up.

[zeroonetwothree]

We have status update meetings that don't even include the manager. I also find them kind of suspect, but what's the explanation for those?

[therealdrag0]

Coordination, mentorship, peer review, banter and camaraderie.

[brailsafe]

"So what time is it where you are? Wow, 6am!? And the weather?"

[therealdrag0]

LOL. Well I'm very against 6am meetings. >10am or bust :)

But actually IME it's not uncommon to actually chat about stuff. What'd you do this weekend? Did you see X movie? How did you solve that issue? But that might only work if it's not 6am.

[coffeebeqn]

How/why are you mentoring people in a standup?

[projectazorian]

“Working on ticket X, but not sure how to do Y.”

“Oh, that’s easy, you just need to change Z.” Or, “No worries, let’s stay on the call and figure it out.”

[avbanks]

But why do you need a status meeting to do that? If you have blocker why not just raise the blocker when you have it instead of waiting for a status meeting.

[therealdrag0]

Rarely is anything "needed" :) and there's usually multiple ways to do something.

But, for example, maybe the person isn't blocked yet so they don't know to ask, but they're going down a road that a coworker knows will be a dead end, and by overhearing it that coworker will speak up and offer a suggestion.

Maybe a senior dev is a 'curmudgeon' who doesn't follow public slack channels, but if you put them in a room with everyone else then they'll contribute.

I think the benefit of status-meetings/stand-ups are not for the status so much as the forced recurring interactions with teammates for humanization and collaboration (a la the infamous "water cooler chats").

(Also FWIW I'm pretty against these sorts of meetings every day. But I think 2-3 a week is a nice balance.)

[lucisferre]

Bad management.