Anyone that has worked in an industry using Agile (or whatever name you give it) has dealt with some form of stand up meeting. These can take multiple shapes and forms, from a 15 minute run through a Scrum board, 5 minute catch up on high level items, or a 30 minute update which can feel like a waste of time for everyone except one very interested person. However you run it, stand up is one of those meetings that's here to stay.
What stand up is really missing though is a review, a different way to approach it, an alternative to get the most out of stand up, and give people the flexibility to work in the best way for them.
Problems with Sync Stand Up
These are the areas I've observed over time where a sync stand up struggles
- Time management
- Inflexible meeting time
- isolated meeting
- If you aren't in it then you miss out
- Remembering what you did
- Not all information is useful for everyone
- No history
- No recorded actions All the above are fixable in a sync stand up, and you might not even be having these problems. But I'm going to walk you through how moving to a async stand up means you'll get a lot of these for free, although you may introduce different problems, so it's all about getting the balance right.
How to Async Stand Up
The first bit of advice is to make sure your team comes along with you during this, it's important that everyone supports this change or else it won't work. Once you have this working though the benefits are huge, and you'll never want to go back.
Define stand up purpose
This may seem easy but it's important to know why you're doing stand up, is it updates for the product, is it a way to ask for help, to share a demo of what's been done or even just a chance to chat in an increasingly distributed world. Whatever the purpose this is a chance to get everyone aligned on
- why your doing it
- what you aim to get out of it It's also a chance to define what it's not, remove all the things that you don't find value in as a team. When making this change to async stand up take it as an opportunity to reset the way you've been doing it so it's valuable.
Remove the stand up meeting
Remove the stand up meeting from you calendar, and instead ask that your team has an update posted by X o'clock. This will instantly give back flexibility to your team, and because there is no meeting anymore you're going to have to use an alternative way to run stand up.
Update differently
The following are approaches you can take to run your stand up differently, you can use one idea or a mixture, whatever works for you and your team:
Message in channel
The most simple option using one of your instant messaging tools (or email) is to ask everyone in the team to give updates in the channel, keeping them detailed, and offering any links for extra context. There are tools specifically built for this in messengers like Slack, but for a starting point just post out a message of your own updates, and ask team members to do the same.
Video message
As the leader of the team you can post a message that summarise the current state of the board, and what the team priorities are. This can then be followed up by others if they want to interject any detail, including videos of their own. The bonus of this is it's easier to explain complex problems, or even show demos via video, which gives a much wider range of ways to perform an update.
Update in ticket
If you use a ticketing system (like Jira) then you could put in a requirement that at the end of every day (or start) that people working on those tickets update in the comments section an update. This gives an ability to have a history of the ticket as well as async way of understanding any issues, helping people to contribute their assistance async too.
Automation
This is a tricky one to get right, but is also the most fun to experiment with, and can also give you a huge amount of value by removing a large portion of admin. This deserves a blog all of it's own, but for now think about how could you use the tools you have now to serve up the information you usually need during stand up, without needing to even ask anyone for updates.
Measure it's Worth
Once you've got setup you now need to know if it's working, the worst thing you could do is introduce a change to stand up and not realise its now worse. If we go back to the "purpose" of stand up we should be able to identify if you're hitting all those goals you defined. We could find metrics, or some smart way to define this but the best way is to just ask your team. Send out a feedback form after a few weeks of changing things and see if it's improved, and take the opportunity to hear if there are any other ideas the team have had to change things up. The more often you use this method of feedback the more your team will be open and honest, especially because even if something works now it doesn't mean it will work forever and for everyone.
Example feedback questions
- What parts of stand up do you find valuable?
- What parts of stand up do you not find valuable?
- Do you have all the information you need after stand up?
- Do you believe stand up serves the purpose we've aimed for?
The key is to keep the questions short, and not too many. You'll get more resistance the more questions you ask so keep the number down and only on the areas you know will help impact improvement. Instead of a question you could use a rating, but I would advise that later as the early stages are important to get detailed feedback to make adjustments.
Summary
We've covered a lot in high level but some of the key take aways are
- define your stand up purpose
- experiment with how to update in stand up
- measure it's working by getting feedback from the team
Being more asynchronous with stand up is going to change a lot for you and your team, and it's OK if you get it wrong, just make sure you know when it's wrong and keep changing things up. Having the purpose clear and understood by everyone will lead you in the right direction of getting the most out of stand up without relying on an inflexible and isolating sync meeting.