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Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?

Posted by Soulskill on from the leveling-up-your-agility dept.

__roo writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of companies are replacing traditional meetings with daily stand-ups. The article points out that stand-up meetings date back to at least World War I, and that in some place, late employees 'sometimes must sing a song like "I'm a Little Teapot," do a lap around the office building or pay a small fine.' Do Slashdot readers feel that stand-up meetings are useful? Do they make a difference? Are they a gimmick?"

9 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Curious by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's curious that they mention the military first doing stand-up meetings - when i was in the military, you stood up only when you were about to fall asleep, but that's all that needs to be said about that.

    In the civilian world, if you have meetings every day, it's because your boss or some other important idiot is a bottleneck in the process and they need daily reinforcement of common sense, at the expense of department productivity.

    1. Re:Curious by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 2, Funny

      The daily meeting has other advantages:
      1. It puts everyone in the same room at the same time and they know what is going on daily. This can stop duplication of effort as sometimes you get multiple requirements across many people but the work is actually nearly the same.

      Do you all even talk to each other? Like, getting up and vocalizing rather than fucking off on Facebook all day?

      2. It helps focus on what your tasks are for the day. Let's face it, there are days that you slack off on not because you don't have enough work but because your daily goal wasn't there. A quick meeting where you need to state your goal keeps you honest and helps you know your goal is for the day.

      You should probably hire less microcephalics and other unmotivated, underpaid interns to do the actual work.

      3. It is informal and no notes, nothing gets fixed in stone, allows for more of an honest assessment.

      None of you have the balls to say that daily meetings are redundant and stupid, so you're all lazy, underpaid, or dumb.

      4. Team lead is informed on what is going on, and when pressed by management he has the answer.

      Why does the lead have to be pressed to know the answer? Once again, your company is full of idiots.

      5. Simple problems can get solved easier. After the meeting people's schedules can disconnect and it could take days to answer a simple question.

      Schedules can disconnect? Anybody who can't walk to another cube and "connect" should be fired.

      6. It keeps your team together.

      Sure, when the meetings happen because of one idiot's shortcomings and it brings us together to insult the idiot. Shit, son, I think you may be on to something.

    2. Re:Curious by bomb_number_20 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Not even close to the same thing.

      Well, not unless every person in your morning company formation sequentially breaks ranks, runs to the front, does an about face and gives a personal status:

      "Company! Yesterday, I did a lot of pushups! Then I low-crawled! Then I cleaned my weapon and did some more pushups! Today, I'm going to walk a lot! My impediments are the group of people across the wire trying to kill me! Hoooahh!!"

      --
      That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
    3. Re:Curious by BasilBrush · · Score: 4, Funny

      I guess the egoless programmer part of Agile methodologies wasn't for you then.

    4. Re:Curious by squiggleslash · · Score: 5, Funny

      You think that's bad? I had to go to the doctor the other day, and he was all "Well, let's cure that cancer of yours" (or whatever it was) and I was like "Hold on a moment, do you know Bresenham's line algorithm?

      Would you believe he didn't? I had to NOT merely describe the algorithm, AND explain how to use sign changes and axies swaps to ensure any line could be drawn, but even what a damned BITMAP was. I walked right out, I wasn't going to trust HIM to heal my brain tumor.

      Also the so-called plumber didn't know what a singleton was. I'm getting impatient now, I've rigged up a siphon to suck water out of the laundy room into the yard, but I haven't found a single pumber yet who knows a damned thing about programming.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  2. stand up - sit down by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Our daily 15 minute stand up meetings turned into daily 1 hour sit downs.....

  3. Re:No magic bullet by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wow, you've really synergized your paradigms for maximum best-of-breed stakeholder network impact, haven't you?

    --
    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  4. Re:So wait, by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 4, Funny

    Depends on what you're smoking.

  5. Dilbert by Frankie70 · · Score: 4, Funny

    http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2008-04-15/