We’ve used a daily stand-up meeting at Slantwise Design for almost a year, variously called our “stand-up,” or “scrum,” or “duck” (don’t ask). At about 10am every morning, the six of us at Slantwise get together for a short meeting to answer three questions:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What will I do today?
- Are any obstacles keeping me from getting work done?
In theory, the meeting should be quick – maybe 10-15 minutes. In theory, it should facilitate communication, put everyone on the same page, strengthen our team, and drive our projects forward.
In practice, it hasn’t worked for us. So a few weeks ago we dropped our morning stand-up, for five reasons, which I’ll outline below.
It has been a good move. We are working better without this morning meeting than with it. Basically, it has been replaced by small group or one-on-one meetings – every morning, I’ll check on each developer and find out where they’re at, what they’re doing, and any issues they’re facing. I’ll sometimes bring a few developers together to do this if they’re working closely together on the same project.
Why we stopped our daily meeting
1. They weren’t short.
We always intended for the meetings to last 10 minutes or so, 15 at the most. But they often stretched to 30-45 minutes. It requires a lot of discipline to keep meetings short, and we had trouble maintaining that discipline month after month.
2. Multiple projects.
We spend about half of our time working on one project across the entire company, and about half of our time working on multiple projects. Daily meetings make a lot more sense when everyone is on the same project, but as a conuslting company, we don’t always have that luxury.
3. Meetings are expensive.
A 30 minute meeting with six developers takes 3 hours of developer time, and we can’t justify billing that time to our clients, unless everyone is working on the same project.
4. Daily meetings affect our start times.
We scheduled our daily meetings for 10am. In theory, this meant that our developers would work for about an hour before our daily meeting, which would bring everyone up to speed each day before our meeting. In practice, however, we put off the heavy work until after the daily meeting, because the interruption was distracting. This meant that our daily start time moved from 9am or 9:30am to 10:30am. That’s a major drop in daily productivity. And unfortunately, a 9am meeting didn’t work, since our daily start time is somewhat flexible.
5. They weren’t helping our communication or productivity.
We expected that a daily meeting would facilitate collaboration, improve communication, and increase productivity. In practice, though, our team communicates quite well without a daily meeting, so the need just isn’t there.
When would daily meetings be valuable?
The next time that our entire team is working on a single project, we may reinstitute daily meetings, but I kind of doubt it. Daily meetings might make sense if a team is using strict Scrum project management, with a product backlog, a scrum master who firmly enforces a 10 minute limit, no chairs, and is doing in-house development on a complex project. But for a consulting company? We honestly work pretty well without them.
I want to say why I vetoed stand-up meeting in my company—my legs hurt. I am unsure why someone thought it would be a good idea to force me to stand (if nothing goes overlong) 15 minutes. Frankly, I’m surprised nobody filed a suit against SCRUM shops for discrimination…
few comments…
One-on-one meetings may be more productive and sensible for team managers. But stand up meetings makes everyone in the team to be well updated on what is happening in the project. There has been several occasions where the stand up meetings saved us from troubles (specially in rush hours).
Regarding the meeting time, I agree with you. That’s why we have the meetings right after the lunch break.
Anyway we still face this challenge of keeping the meetings short.
No surprises. Read Peopleware.
I agree with Hasith above. I’ve always felt that the purpose of a stand up meeting is for team communication, rather than to keep the team lead or manager informed (I see this as a side benefit, as he/she is part of the team). Because of this focus on team communication, the meetings are much more beneficial for a team working on the same project and less productive for members that are on different teams. I’ve also been on a team where instead of team meetings, the team lead came around to check in on each of us and I felt more in the dark than on projects with daily team meetings.
Also, keeping the meetings short and on track is definitely a challenge.
I’ve posted a few more of my thoughts here: More on daily meetings
Scott and Hasith – I’m with you. I’ve been on projects where I’ve wished for a daily standup (large teams, no one knows who is working on what, etc.). I think that team size and team coherence is a major factor in determining whether daily meetings are valuable.
Our team is 6, which is really 4 developers + design + QA. We work in close proximity (a small office), and closely (we practice collective code ownership), whether we’re working on one project or three. So we communicate pretty organically and rarely is anyone surprised by what someone else is doing.
But of course, I’m sure daily meetings prevent major problems for other teams, and would probably be very valuable some places where they aren’t being used. Every project and every team is different.