Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?
__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?"
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.
From the article:
The current wave of stand-up meeting is being fueled by the growing use of "Agile," an approach to software development, crystallized in a manifesto published by 17 software professionals in 2001.
Which is true.
Don't be so quick to blame management. I know it's a reflex here on /., but the current craze for stand-up meetings, scrum, agile, etc., are being driven by tech staff.
You don't get the point of the standup meeting. Why is it standup, it is to keep the meeting short, and to the point. Where otherwise it will be an hour long sit down meeting once a week.
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.
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.
3. It is informal and no notes, nothing gets fixed in stone, allows for more of an honest assessment.
4. Team lead is informed on what is going on, and when pressed by management he has the answer.
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.
6. It keeps your team together.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
but the current craze for stand-up meetings, scrum, agile, etc., are being driven by tech staff.
That's daft and primitive though. The real tech way of having more productive meetings is: require most meetings to be done via text instant-messaging (IM):
That way:
1) you automatically get minutes of the meeting (the bosses could require the transcripts to be posted somewhere).
2) you can be in multiple meetings at the same time, potentially even chairing one meeting while attending a few others. Heck the bosses could attend them all, not to chime in like an idiot, but in case his/her official approval/opinion for something is required (reduce latency!).
3) you can do work and other stuff (slashdot, youtube)[1] while attending the meetings.
4) You can set "AFK", go to the toilet, come back, and scroll up to see what happened while you went AFK, without requiring everyone to recap or wait for you.
Now of course programmers generally are better off with an uninterrupted stretch for heavy-duty coding. So what bosses could do is require most/all meetings to be within a certain time range of the day. With IM meetings, it is not a showstopper if you have a few meetings scheduled for the same time.
This way bosses can squeeze even more out of employees ;).
Of course this requires employees who can actually read and type at reasonable speeds, and multitask.
With normal physical presence meetings (stand-up or not), you could have 5 people mostly idle, with the only the chairperson reasonably busy, for the entire meeting time. Not very efficient.
IM meetings could take a bit longer - many people don't type as fast as they can speak and do a normal presentation, but I don't think that's a show-stopper.
FWIW, are stand-up meetings really more productive and effective than other sort of physical meetings? Or are they merely shorter, leaving more time to get the work done... You can actually have productive meetings - you must have a good reason for meetings, agenda, etc etc (plenty of stuff written on that already).
[1] This gets harder once there are too many meetings in parallel that require your concentration, but hey you want productive right?
> 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.
I know this might be a little foreign to someone from the military, but some of us get multiple things done in a day. Our team has a daily standup to ensure we don't step on each others' toes too often, while we're getting shit done. The manager is almost never present, nor does he speak unless spoken to in the standups (with exceptions, if he's gone and done something related to one of our features or has a concern about contingency).
Your sentiment is backward, at best.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
"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!!"
Not everyone's 11B, you know.
When I was a medic, we had a simple, informal process for shift change and report. "Here's what happened on the night shift, here's what's going on with the patients we have in here right now, hope you have an easy day." Once a year or so, the DoD would go through some management-techniques craze sold to the brass by some Senator's brother-in-law, and the word would come down from on high to use whatever the latest buzzword methodology was. We'd play along for a little while, and then when they weren't looking over our shoulders any more, we'd laugh and forget about it and go back to doing what actually worked.
Nothing I've seen in my years in industry and academia since getting out have convinced me that there is any value at all in any kind of meeting ritual. The more "process" you try to ladle onto the job of communicating with your co-workers, the less actual communication takes place. This is true regardless of whether you're trying to take and hold ground, save lives, or just get the damned code out the door.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
This is what I came to say. We had standup meetings every day and it devolved into one particularly megalomaniacal aspie micro-manager telling staff how to stand in the most abusive tone possible. I quit shortly after that started.
The British Queen has daily meetings where she's the only one sitting. It's not for any formal reason but rather to make the meeting as short and to the point as possible. From what former PM's say, it works really well.
Britain's highest-level meeting, the 'Privy Council', has for centuries been stand-up only. All HM Queen ever says there is "assent", and that certainly keeps it quick too.
This is exactly the point I wanted to make. I've been doing professional software dev for over 20 years and if an interviewer asked me to explain an algorithm off of the top of my head I would immediately know that this is not someone I would ever want to work for – primarily because it tells me they're clueless and quite likely in way the hell over their head. Frequently, software development isn't about what you know... it's about what you don't know and how quickly you can learn it. Yes, there are some core things that help along the way, but being able to regurgitate a bunch of facts only tells me that you'd do well on the MCSE exam. How well you could deal with unknowns (i.e., whether you can do problem solving or not) is unrelated to amount of trivia you can spout.
As to standing meetings... been there, done that; circa 1998 or so (IIRC). Yet another attempt to avoid the correct solution to "the meeting problem". The correct solution is to stop having regularly scheduled meetings. You can easily schedule meetings as the need arises. I would also be for voting by the invitees as to whether the meeting is necessary or not.
That may be true, but not in Dijkstra's case. Dijkstra is quite simple. If, in an interview, I ask the candidate to design an algorithm for a shortest-path search in a graph, and he does not eventually arrive at a breadth first algorihm (Dijkstra) or a well design depth first, he's out. It's not about the formal knowledge, as much as it is about the thought process. A programmer who can't pass this test will surely design problematic software (in many fronts, like performance or security).
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
I think this depends much on the dysfunction of the organisation as a whole.
Regular daily stand-ups are great for dysfunctional organisations, not exclusively but particularly, as much signal can be added to noise. "Dave has X issue yesterday, this is how he fixed it." "We're expecting high volumes over the coming week." "There's a new UAT manager in Y." Absolutely fantastic for these things, but very short and sweet. It ensures everyone hears the osmosis at a high level, and allows the team coordinator to share their daily dashboard highlight view, all to enrich each of their views.
Not in a meeting room, not sitting down, just standing up for 5 minutes face-to-face. That level of information sharing, especially in dysfunctional organisations where an individual's inbox may receive 900+ emails per day, which I have seen and been horrified at, is essential.
Absolutely not saying they're only useful for dysfunctional organisations, but are a necessary daily for dysfunctional organisations.
How to do them well? Empower all; do not dictate; keep to 'team' size which should be 5-10 people, any teams larger than this probably have difficult structural issues, a team larger than 10 cannot empower a stand-up as it will unless with great skill degenerate to a grand town meeting.