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by Robby Russell.
Original Post: The Daily Stand Up
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I’ll admit it. I’ve never read a book that outlines that SCRUM process in detail but do have a copy of The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun. In chapter ten, Berkun points out the purpose of having meetings as well as the annoyances that surround them. Over the past six months, we have toyed around with a few different approaches to holding meetings. There was a short period of time where we really weren’t sure what the best way to get company-wide information to everyone without boring them to death once a month or week.
A few months ago we tried something totally crazy… daily meetings! It caught on rather well.
There is one rule though, nobody can stand up. :-)
We hold a meeting every day at the same time and do not make any exceptions. Well, I will admit that we’ve missed two or three in the past several months but overall, we’re very good at keeping to the schedule.
So, how does this process work?
Each morning, I spend about 15 minutes preparing for a 10 minute meeting… which also is how I build my list for the day. This list appears on an index card as I keep it with me throughout the whole day. I also keep the previous and next days card with me so that I can make sure that things that didn’t get done yesterday get done today or tomorrow. Some of these tasks end up on BaseCamp or just get checked off as I complete the task.
Each morning at 9:15 AM PST (now you know where we are when we aren’t working or on IRC), we meet in our conference room and stand in something that looks similar to a circle. I wait until everybody finds their way into the conference room and then say, “Good morning!” I then do go over the following things (and use my index cards to keep me on topic)...
What did I do yesterday (or Friday/weekend)?
What will I do today?
Then the person who decided to stand next to me follows and we do this around the room… I think the order this morning was:
Robby
Jeremy
Brian
Jason
David
Allison
This is a good time to also bring up any thing that might be useful for everyone to hear… such as, ”we got a new development contract signed yesterday!” or ”client x will be on-site at 1:30 PM.” Along with this, we’re able to ask questions about other peoples work and act as a sanity check. Why the stand up? Nobody likes to just stand around for too long… when you stand up you avoid getting too comfortable and people are more likely to stay on topic and focused.
The meetings typically last 10-15 minutes and if you’re not doing something like this with your team… how do you cope on a daily basis?
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