[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.