[ams6110]

I've never experienced standups that weren't status meetings, and weren't serious flow disrupters. You get to the office, but don't really want to get too deeply into your work because you know standup time is 9:00. The team gets together, each person summarizes what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, what blockers they have. Everyone else mostly zones out. Next thing you know 30 minutes have passed, and by the time you get back to your desk and start to get ready to work you are already thinking "well lunch is coming up, no point in getting into anything substantial until the afternoon..."

I think standups could work, but they should only focus on things that impact the project (breaking change to an interface, or significant new things that are available) or things that are blocking work. And honestly I think email does a better job at that with a lot less impact on flow.

[mmatants]

30 minutes? That's definitely a long time. I've only been in an environment that does standups for a few months now, but for 5-8 people (team + PM/etc) it has rarely gone beyond 5-7 minutes (everyone rhymes things off in 40-60 seconds each, and any spin-off conversations are aggressively deferred).

It actually has worked really well in preventing of siloing/cliquing of work effort. Another thing that has helped greatly is using a physical task board and organizing conversation by task instead of by person. This puts less emphasis on "looking useful" as individuals and more on championing tasks to see their completion.

[ajitk]

> This puts less emphasis on "looking useful" as individuals and more on championing tasks to see their completion.

This is a very good approach. Separating task and people is key to getting things done. When things are getting tough for an individual, the team can rally behind.

[pyre]

The common thread I see in your complaints about stand-ups are the "I can't break my work into pieces, I need several hours of intense focus to work on anything."

E.g., Your stand-up is from 9-930a. After which you can't start anything substantial because 'lunch is coming,' but that's 2.5 hours away (assuming you lunch at noon).

[jbellis]

That's pretty common. "Maker's schedule" http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html rings true to every technical person I know.

[davidwoof1]

You're looking at the wrong side of the meeting. It's the time before the meeting, not the time after.

I like morning stand-ups, but a big problem is that if the stand-up is at 9, I start winding down whatever I'm doing around 8:30, and I don't start new tasks after 8-8:30. Multiply the loss by the entire team every day and that's potentially a big loss of time. And because everyone's schedule is different, there's really no place to put the meeting that avoids the problem.

The benefits of a well-run standup can outweight this productivity cost, but it's a real cost that needs to be considered.

[ams6110]

Has anyone ever tried an end-of-the-day standup? Would not tend to disrupt flow, because you're going home afterwards. Also might help keep the gathering focused and on-topic.

I guess this does presume that everyone wraps up at about the same time every day, which I've generally found to be the case, but may not work well with widely distributed workers or places where people actually practice a wider range of work hours.

[tcharron]

I have seem teams use end of day stand-ups. The problem with those is that they tend to devolve into status updates pretty quickly.

Team members report on what they did that day, but seldom think about the things they are going to get done next and the things that are preventing them from getting started on the next thing, which in my opinion, are the more important things to focus on.

[msrpotus]

A team I interned with did standups at the end of the day but honestly, at that point, you just want to go home; you don't want to stay to hear what's going on with everyone else.

[sultezdukes]

One thing we had for an action item of our retrospective is to start consolidating meetings.

We had a huge problem with non-delivery people scheduling meetings willy-nilly, just because people's calendar's were free.

I've put the kibosh on that, as much as possible, especially in the afternoon.

[Aaronontheweb]

Speaking as an engineering manager - I've only had to use standups in environments where engineers were not good at checking in their code and closing out issues regularly. I HAVE to have that information, regardless of how I get it.

I would strongly prefer to have a stream of commits and JIRA issues in HipChat to review the following morning than have to do a standup. But not all engineers are as good as they like to believe they are at following development workflows and processes.

[tcharron]

Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you. While I appreciate your need to know what's going on with the team, in Agile and Scrum, the daily stand-up isn't there to provide status to managers.

The purpose of the meeting is for the team to get together and co-ordinate the work that needs to be done in order to meet their Sprint goals. So while you may be able to get status information out of that, it's more important for team members to use that time to figure out how to meet their goals.

In addition, status should be obvious in Agile teams. This is why you usually see things like cards on walls and burn down charts. If status isn't obvious to everyone, you may want to see if there are other ways the team can make that information highly visible.

Check out: https://www.udemy.com/improv-your-agile-scrum-stand-up/?coup... for more.

[bstpierre]

> Since you are a manager, I might suggest that the Agile and Scrum the daily stand-up isn't for you

I definitely agree with this. Standups/scrums have become much more productive since management stopped attending. It's hardly a "status" meeting any more -- sure, we talk about what we're working on, but there's a lot of jumping in by other team members with suggestions, help, or "I was going to do something similar, let's coordinate after the meeting".

[wpietri]

Yes, you've experienced terrible stand-up meetings. My rule of thumb is 10 minutes, max. Is everybody really standing comfortably for 30 minutes? Your coworkers must be tougher than I am.

Also, who are people talking to if not the rest of the team? Why are they saying things that other team members don't care about?