Daily Meetings Are Great but You Should Never Have Them

Part 32904 in the continuing saga of <i>"my stand-ups suck, so all stand-ups suck"</i>.<p>Sorry, not even going to bother with non-snark response. I did that the 32903 times before, and someone else already took the bait.<p>But I'll bite on this though:<p>&#62; <i>All meetings are terrible.</i><p>Meetings can be awesome. I've been to meetings full of great new ideas. I've been in meetings that saved companies. I've been in meetings in which shit was actually decided <i>and</i> followed up on!<p>I've been in meetings that lasted for days(!) but eliminated months of painful processes and left people feeling exhausted but victorious.<p>Meetings can be great. Meetings can be fun. Meetings can have a purpose. Meetings can have results. Meetings can change the world.<p>It's badly organized, forced and unproductive meetings with the wrong people that suck. Guess what, that applies to virtually any activity with a group of people. Including orgies. Especially orgies.

Ok, I'll take the bait.<p>I need to make a web page about standups and just start posting links to it. It's the same question time after time, and I keep thinking I'm going to forget part of the answer.<p>Standups are not meetings, at least not like I know them. Some teams have "standups" while doing a morning walk. Some meet at the coffee shop. Some have stopwatches and pigs and chickens and all sorts of other things. So what? Meetings usually involve sitting around, an agenda, a leader, a desired set of outcomes, and so forth. Standups really don't have any of that in the traditional sense. The output from a standup is just an informal agenda for the day. People meet, they discuss what's up, they break up and informally get together to do stuff. Standups are designed to <i>prevent</i> meetings, not be another one.<p>"Because it’s the information that’s great: the meetings are time-sinks."<p>No, it's about non-verbal communication and social interaction around common team problems. We've found that listing the 3 things helps do that. You might get the same effect with having each person act out an improv based on their feelings. I don't know. Give it a shot. But it's not about information. No. No. No, no no. Technology teams are made of people, not robots, and the work of everybody getting on the same page and keeping up is a <i>human</i> job full of social nuance, not the exchange of status information.<p>Later on we get here:<p>"...the only benefit to having a meeting is the face-to-face discussion that it allows for. Or, to put it another way: if you’re structuring your meeting around trying to eliminate anything that isn’t a two-minute “this is what I did/am doing/am having trouble with” update, why are you having a meeting at all?"<p>"Discussion" a much better word, but you're once again assuming that it's all some kind of information flow happening. <i>The hardest part of working in technology teams is the social factor</i>, not the bandwidth of information flow. Standups are about physically looking each other in the eye, figuring out where everybody is, and figuring out if you can help. It's not information, and it's really not discussion.<p>I'll put in a plug for anybody that's interested: I've created a no-frills "Agile Team Tune-up" email course. No selling, just a weekly concept explained with ways to apply in your team. If you're interested, here's the sign-up: <a href="http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl</a>

This article is like magic! By which I mean the exciting part is all misdirection.<p>In meetings, the time lost is obvious. Which is why people focus on doing them well. By moving it to email, you're not saving time; you're just hiding it. And, I'm sure, increasing it.<p>I'm a fast writer. I practice pretty much every day. But there is no way I could write my standup contributions as quickly as just saying them. I'd guess writing is 5-10x as long. In a stand-up, I can point at the board and say, "I'm done with this; it was easy. I'm still working on that; it got hairy." If somebody needs more, I can see it on their face and raise an eyebrow; they'll ask me what they need to know.<p>To write a decent status update, I have to guess at all the reasonable questions and head most of them off. It is much more work. And then to keep up, I have to check my email. And integrate each person's comments with everybody else's to try to form a coherent picture. And then to follow up on the mysterious bits. A giant waste. I try to keep email off my coding machines entirely; distraction is a productivity-killer.<p>This also ignores so much of what I get out of stand-ups. I can see who's happy and who's dragging. I get an easy opportunity to grab somebody for a quick discussion. I get information through tone of voice, posture, and expression. Information about relationships, about features, about code. I get charged up at the beginning of the day knowing that we are all diving in on the same thing.

Of the Three Pillars of Standup (what you did yesterday[1], what you are doing today[2], what are you stuck on[3]) I really only find [3] to be of much value.<p>Git log/Kanban board can tell you [1]/[2] if you actually need to know these things (hint: you probably don't unless you are manager/team lead/product owner).<p>Kanban blocker stickies can do [3] but I think a designated "safe haven" to get help is useful, at least for teams of varying skill level and comfort with one another.<p>My favorite standups have been the ones that "devolved" (in the formal capital-A Agile sense) to "Anyone blocked?" <i></i><i>crickets</i><i></i> "Okay. Good standup."

This has it's own set of problems, namely, it is more difficult to do this over email than it is to just talk face-to-face; that is, it is slower.<p>Yes, what the author offers here is asynchronous and most developers love that idea. However, in practice I've seen this method fail more often than it succeeds. Why?<p>Face-to-face synchronous communication matters. Problems are addressed quickly, brainstorms happen. Personal relationships develop; mentors and mentee relationships evolve. Perhaps another developer had your problem with some pesky JS library last week and gives you just the clue you needed, and so on. I actually think standup meetings are not only not the worst thing ever, but the best thing ever for a growing developer as they allow them to quickly see what others are doing, and quickly get feedback on their own work.

We have these kind of daily meetings and I would never replace them with an email thread. Answering the three questions in writing would not only be more burdensome but you would also lose out on the valuable instant feedback.

What I dislike about this is how preoccupied people are with <i>how</i> the rules of daily meetings should be enforced. As if it is a given that a) there must be daily meetings, and b) they must be <i>defined as rules</i>. I would rather we focused on the goal instead: The dev team must be coordinated, and they must not deviate enormously from the schedule without the project manager at least knowing about it.<p>So here's our process for ensuring this:<p>Nothing.<p>It turns out that when you have skilled and motivated people working without process handcuffs, they are able, and actually eager to <i>self-organize</i>.<p>- How do we keep in touch? We set up a HipChat room where we discuss things both on and off topic asynchronously. Is our process "we will use a chat room for daily chitchat"? No. We use it because it makes sense, and when it stops making sense, we do something else instead.<p>- How do we catch one dev needing help? He says so. Then we can meet up and pair program or discuss the issue or whatever makes sense. Do we have "pair programming tuesdays" to enforce this? No. It just happens when it needs to.<p>- How do we make sure one dev doesn't drift off procastinating for two weeks? Turns out that's not really a relevant problem for us. We find that skilled devs given freedom and responsibility will live up to it. But on the off chance that it happened, we <i>would</i> notice the lack of work flowing from checkins and code review and work tasks.<p>- How do we make sure the project manager knows of any problems? We tell him. Simple as that. And usually on the way to luch, he asks "things going ok?" and we answer "yep" or "slightly behind it seems, we might delay task X till next week". Do we have a "pre lunch meetup" process to define this? No. It happens naturally because <i>we all have a desire to cooperate</i>.<p>- How do we make sure the devs don't shit in the sink while on the bathroom? We <i>could</i> have a process in place with a post-bowel-movement checkup rota. Or we could enforce pair toiletgoing with a senior architect. But we decided not to. It turns out the devs have a sense of hygiene, and therefore shit into the toilet bowl of their own accord.

I'm sort of onboard with this and sort of not. I certainly believe that actual face-to-face communication has a place, and that it should occur with some regular frequency. I also believe in short, fast, lightweight meetings ala what a daily Scrum meeting <i>should</i> be.<p>But, between the fact that a lot of these meetings devolve into something that is not short, fast or lightweight, and my observation over the years that <i>daily</i> is probably overly frequent for these meetings, I tend to mostly agree with the author of TFA.<p>Every team has it's unique needs, but for a lot of teams I'd go for a compromise with one, maybe two meatspace meetings per week (maybe Monday and Thursday) and then a technical solution using email or blogs or an enterprise social network or whatever, for a daily "standup".<p>It's not just "scrum" type meetings that could be replaced with a "no physical presence required" techie solution either... some companies have a culture of accountability (which is a good thing) taken to an extreme degree where half the company spends most of their time tied up in "status update" and "checkpoint" meetings. I've talked to people who say they can never schedule a real meeting (that is, a one off for attacking a specific problem) in their companies, because all of the participants are too over-committed with these status meetings! For these, I absolutely advocate finding a way to communicate most of thi status information electronically, and cut the frequency (and length) of the meatspace meetings back dramatically.

There are other costs to daily meetings - namely when should you have them? If you have them in the middle of the day, you interrupt the schedule. At the end of the day, then the energy you're looking to develop in the meeting goes the wrong direction (plus it inevitably interrupts someone who was in flow and just wanted to keep working). Therefore you want it at the beginning of the day.<p>But what if people want to start their days at different times? Now they can't!<p>I feel this a lot right now. Due to unexpected personal circumstances I have wound up needing to go from "provide child support" to "provide financial support". So I just began a job search. But one past employer who would be otherwise reasonable to apply to went onto my list of places to avoid applying to for a while. Why? Because most of their teams have daily standups at around 9:30-10 AM, and there is still rush hour traffic around Los Angeles at that time. I'd like to spend the morning with my kids, get ready, arrive at 11 AM and totally miss rush hour. (Then leave late and miss it on the other end as well!) But they can't accommodate that.<p>If you have daily meetings, have you discouraged someone from working for you? Quite possibly so. But if my experience is a guide, you probably won't even hear about it.

From the title I was expecting to disagree, but this isn't about "not having" the meetings, it's about taking them offline. I think I agree with this. I should have done this at my previous job. The devs had flexible schedules (which I support), and trying to have a fixed schedule for daily stand-ups was unworkable and I eventually gave up. This would have worked much better.

I used to work as a process engineer at a semiconductor manufacturing plant. The plant ran 24/7, so we had (almost) round-the-clock engineering coverage. "Stand-up" meetings weren't viable because many of the engineers on the same team would work at different hours, so at the end of the day each engineer was required to send a "passdown" via e-mail.<p>A passdown included the experiments that ran on your reactor for the day, the experiments that were planned for the next day, and potential research directions based on the results. With a trail of passdowns, any engineer could easily pick up on the thread of logic from the previous engineer and continue working in their stead (if they are on their weekend, vacation, sick, etc.).<p>The nature of the job necessitated leaving behind a trail for someone else to follow, but I think it's a great process to be adapted to other work environments.

Daily meetings are not really for obtaining useful status information. They're about habituating people into doing real work every day, so that they don't feel like jackasses when they have to report to their peers that they didn't do anything yesterday.<p>People ostensibly do work to get paid, but that's not really what motivates them to get anything done. Fear of losing face is one such motivation. The dollar is the currency of this century, but social currency is millions of years old and works much better.<p>And that is why these meetings must be face to face; email doesn't generate enough shame.

Meetings are synchronous, email is asynchronous. The feedback loop is tighter.<p>Standups get lots of bright minds in the same place at the same time.<p>Standups let you know what else is going on, which is indeed useful. I've never understood this thing about silos and belittling out-of-band communication. The only way to get the Big Picture is to hear what other people are working on, preferably in an unfiltered manner. Then again, a lot of developers seem to prefer their little heads-down silo, worrying that their little room is uncomfortably warm without knowing the house is on fire.

My team uses IFTTT for daily standup emails, and it's really been a huge help for us. Here's the recipe if anyone else wants to use it: <a href="https://ifttt.com/recipes/86294" rel="nofollow">https://ifttt.com/recipes/86294</a>

I swear I see a variant of this article every week, and the discussion is always the same. TL;DR make sure your standup meetings are incredibly fast.

I've yet to participate in a useful meeting.