Standup Meetings: Missing the Forest for a Tree
I’ve seen some teams getting so caught up in answering the 3 questions of the stand-up meetings, that they even forget the objective behind the standup meeting.
Following are NOT the goals of a standup meeting:
- Get in-sync or to know who is doing what & where they stand.
- That information can be achieved through the story-wall (virtual story-wall if you are using a Agile PM tool). If you are a team of 3-4 people and sitting next to each other, you’ll anyway have this information (you better).
- To identify impediments.
- Why wait till the standup meeting to identify something is blocking you. If you can’t solve something yourself, bring it up to others notice immediately. Don’t sit on it.
- Status report.
- This is the worst goal you can have for standup meetings. We are moving away from micro-management.
- Communication to the chickens.
- Again they can look at the project status on the story-wall. Or they can stop by in the team room and talk to someone informally. We don’t need to have a meeting for them.
- And so on…
IMHO the real goals of a standup meeting is
- To come up with a Game Plan till the next standup meeting.
- Its an opportunity to inspect and adapt
- Helps in doing micro-re-prioritization
- Helps in keeping everyone on the same page as far as the goals/vision is concerned
If answering the 3 questions helps towards this goal, then go ahead. But don’t think of them as an end in themselves.
