10 minute standup , woof
That's exactly how I run my standups.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
* Do I need something?
* What is my _top_ priority for the day?
* Am I blocked?
The answers for the first and third question should always be "No" because you should have raised them before standup, but it's a relief valve if you didn't.
What is your top priority should be short and focused. If you let people talk about what they did or didn't do yesterday it becomes a slog with people justifying their progress or non-progress. Ultimately it doesn't matter. Focusing on the top priority he's focus people on their main task for the day.
> What is my _top_ priority for the day?
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
>Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"
Absolutely, you can be more specific about the specific aspect if you want, but it's mainly a forcing tool for focus and not an accountability tool. Although everyone thinks it's accountability
My team has 15min standups, in holiday times we regularly stop after 10min. Very focussed on the sprint goal and getting each other unstuck- it's great. Much better than the "let's walk over every issue on the jira board and argue about technical implementations".
The first standup experience of my career predates “agile” and was run by my first engineering manager, who happened to be an ex-marine. QA was unhappy with the product. (There was QA!) 10m standups were instituted at 8:45a in the QA workspace. Great process hacking: QA could interject and also hear first hand orientation. Everyone started their day knowing the plan. (And everyone started their day at the same time.) Fun to reflect on how much has changed.
> and getting each other unstuck
Let me guess, there is no group text chat where people can randomly whine and get unstuck by whoever notices and is an expert on the problem?
This is the thing I dislike most about chat. It encourage people to be lazy. Don't make any effort, just throw your problem out to the group the moment you don't immediately know what to do next.
Do you drop everything every time a chat message is posted like it's a life threatening emergency?
This is generally how my team works, but we don't have a hard cap on the time. I just think nobody wants to debate about technical implementations early in the morning.
In my world stand-ups are mainly status, blockers and other ops/admin updates.
No functional/topic discussions. If they’re required you schedule those in the standup and decide who participates.
No need to expand beyond 15min in that mode.
No need for everyone to be in a room together either, to do that.
It’s more efficient for us at least.
It reduced the number of back and forth on slack/other tools quite a bit.
The root problem, of course, is that no one stands up at anymore at standups.
This is my problem, but I’m not great at standing, for reasons, but it’s physically not good. 10m is ok but there’s always some bore who wants to blather on. Or “we’re done, can x and y stay back to discuss z” and then everybody stays for some reason.
I’m prone to this, as is many a manager/leader in a standup. I always designated the spiciest admin to run the meeting and keep us on time; you need someone who can cut off the boss or these take forever.