[benjaminwootton]

You are missing the point of a standup somewhat.

>> Morning standups force people to be in work before 10:00.

What's wrong with that? Surely 10:00 can be considered core hours for anyone who isn't a remote worker?

>> They always overrun. Rarely are standups shorter than 10 minutes. 6 person team * 30 minutes = 3 hours lost.

They never last that long in my experience, but even if they did, 30 minutes per person per day to sync up the team sounds reasonable to me.

>> Action points are rarely produced, so the value of the outcome is questionable.

Standups aren't about acquiring 'action points'. They're about knowledge sharing, raising problems and impediments, making progress visible etc. You don't decide during the standup what people should be doing.

>> Others switch off if they’re not interested in the current monologue.

That's why it's a short standup. Its whole reason for being is to avoid long meetings, status updates and overhead. Anyone who can't stay focussed for 15-30 minutes in a morning also has a severe case of ADHD.

>> Notes are rarely taken, so by the time the weekly update gets compiled the team have to scratch their heads about what they did over the last week.

If you have minutes (and agendas and notes etc) then it ceases to be a standup and turns into just another meeting! Again, the whole idea behind the standup is to avoid this kind of stuff.

There is lots you could rant about in agile, but a morning standup is definetly one of the things you should retain.

[heliodor]

I've worked at two companies where the day starts at 10am. You'd be surprised how common this is. For people without families and who live in big cities like New York, flex time allows you to go out at night any given night, have a good time, not miss out on sleep, and still have a full day of work by waking up at 9am or 10am. When someone in your team suggests to start the standup fifteen minutes earlier so that no two teams' standups overlap, how do you respond? "I don't want to wake up 15 minutes earlier", or silence?

Morning stands up are a great way for management to ensure people are pressured into showing up for work at a given time without having to be the bad guy and actually say it.

My experience with morning standups is that people arrive to work right before the standup or a few minutes into it, are not in the right mindset to form coherent sentences about their work, and as a result the standup is a slow monotone monologue that no one pays attention to. The one day a week when the manager joins the standup to listen in, everyone faces him and it becomes a report trying to look good and sound like they accomplished a lot that day.

Bottom line, skip the physical standup and use Trello instead!