Scrum recommends timeboxing daily standup meetings at 15 minutes. If you can’t finish in 15 minutes, there may be something wrong with your format.
Are you actually standing up? What are you talking about? Each person should answer three questions:
- What have you accomplished since the last meeting?
- What do you plan to accomplish between now and the next meeting?
- What, if anything, is impeding your progress?
Focus on accomplishments, not just assigned tasks, i.e., don’t say “I’m working on A and I’m planning to work on B.” Don’t have discussions. Anything coming out at the meeting that needs to be discussed can be discussed after the meeting. Try saying this more often: Let’s talk about that after the meeting. Immediately after the meeting if necessary, without even leaving the room, but not during the meeting.
Anyone in the meeting who is not responsible for accomplishing things during the sprint should not be talking.
Are you clicking through a project management tool to review what each team member is working on? Don’t do that. Anyone who wants or needs that information can click through the project management tool on their own time. Talk about accomplishments and blockers.
Why is this important? Well, you can meet or you can work, but you can’t meet and work at the same time. I recently observed a daily standup with 20 attendees (including remote workers) that was running 30 minutes a day, i.e., 15 minutes too long. They were losing 300 minutes per day (15 minutes x 20 people), 25 hours a week, and 100 hours per 4-week sprint.
Do the math on your own standups and decide if it’s important to you.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
