Relevant Stand-Up Meetings

The stand-up meeting has long been used by the military (e.g., roll-call) to account for and synchronize troops.

Meetings should last as long as needed. No longer.

Nobody schedules a "lunch hour" and then eats nonstop for the full hour, dropping his fork at the 60^th minute, with no regard whatsoever to the amount of food consumed. Yet this is the way every meeting works.
~Skip and Dan Heath

The primary motivation behind a stand-up is to apply a force (gravity) to keep the meeting short -- and with any luck, relevant.

Unchecked, a meeting will fill up whatever time is allotted to it.

Out-of-the-box, the familiar Scrum prescription for the Daily Scrum is to tell the team:

• What I did yesterday;
• What I'll do today; and
• What (if anything) I am blocked by…

Please don't let that box you in!

Regrettably, an under-used option is:

• I pass.  -- I graciously cede my time to a teammate.

Be honest. If you've got nadda, simply pass. Most teammates will gladly give you permission to shut your pie hole.

Most of us have stood through painfully irrelevant stand-up meetings. Why are they irrelevant?

For starters, forget about the Scrum prescription, I don't give a rip what you did yesterday -- unless it impacts me today. Further, I am guessing most of us despise the self-congratulatory tone people use while verbally bullet-pointing all of the story points they burned down yesterday. It's irrelevant. What the hell is a story point any way, and why do I care?

Stand-ups also become irrelevant when there's no highly visible, low-tech story wall to supplement our individual narratives -- when most of the team intelligence is obscured in project tracking software, or in a rarely visited Wiki (my apologies to visionary Ward Cunningham), or worse, neatly tucked away in SharePoint.

When the stand-up become a status meeting, rather than an impact meeting, it loses relevance.

If the purpose is simply a status meeting, then lets insist everyone who wants to give a status update do isometric wall-sits while they regale bored team-members with yesterday's accomplishments.

Over the past decade the stand-up meeting, with varying degrees of success, has become one of the hallmarks of Agile teams. The purpose is to synchronize team thinking and to share a commitment to the tasks at hand. A Scrum, or a huddle, metaphor or not, is to

• Set direction and 
• Focus on the next play.

I don't have a prescription for stand-ups. Nor do I believe in prescriptions. Like all process minutiae, the best approach is context-dependent.

While I always hope for something wildly informative to tell my teammates, it rarely happens. So when it is coming around to my turn to speak, I think about

• What is most crucial for the team to know?
• How might something I did impact my teammates? 
• Will my tasks today involve other teammates?
• Is a teammate dependent on me to complete something?
• Should I pass?