Standup meetings are an important part of agile methodology. It is a quick meeting, done in regular intervals either daily or weekly - to provide transparency about what everyone in the team is working on. This meeting is also used to discuss challenges that the team is facing related to tasks that are in progress or backlog.
Standup meetings, if done correctly, make your team more productive, comfortable around each other and boost collaboration. But, running an effective team meeting is not an easy task. It needs enforcement of discipline, and changes in habits of everyone in the team.
What is a Standup?
Standup meeting is not just another team meeting or just a catchup meeting. It is a special meeting that is aimed to bring everyone in the team on the same page before everyone starts their work for the day. Standups are a part of Agile Methodology.
People often have this assumption that standups are for software development teams, but they are wrong. Standup meetings are for every team that wants transparency and collaboration.
In a standup meeting, is a quick sync-up between everyone in the team where everyone is supposed to share their updates in the following format:
- What did they accomplish yesterday?
- What is their plan for the day?
- Are they facing any challenge or a blocker in their task?
That’s it. If everyone in your team can share updates like this, then you are running an almost perfect standup meeting.
When I joined one of my previous companies, I was shocked to see how poorly the standup meeting was being run. The standup meeting was optional for people to join. There were no guidelines on how the standup should be run, no JIRA board for reference and absolutely no collaboration.
I was part of the platform and we used to own 5-6 critical services like events, authentication, communication, etc. Each service had 2-3 devs and 2 shared QAs. With so many people and so many things going around, it was difficult to understand what was happening. We had an Engineering Manager too who had just transitioned from SDE4, even he didn’t used to join.
Main Problems With This Setup
- Everyone in the team used to skip the standup meeting, unless someone posts on the channel. Even the EM used to join after seeing the message. Since there was consistency, the team never used to take this seriously.
- Everyone used to share their updates, but no one was interested in listening to others’ updates. This often results in loss of collaboration.
- Devs used to share about tasks that don’t have any tickets created. This often used to lead to less accountability.
As you can see above that it is really easy to screw-up standup meetings and because of that the team’s productivity can take a hit. People can leverage it to do absolutely nothing and since tasks are not getting tracked anywhere people could come up with random stuff - I was working with DevOps on on-Call issue, etc and there no way to enforce accountability.
How to Run Effective Standup Meetings
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Keep it Consistent: Yes, a great standup meeting starts with consistency. Keep the time slot, interval (daily, weekly) and format of the meeting fixed. The team should follow this religiously and make sure everyone in the team joins the meeting. Any sort of inconsistency can bring down the importance of this meeting and the motivation of the team to join it.
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Everyone in the team should join the standup: Make sure that everyone in your team is joining the standup. If you have people from other teams working with your team, extend the invite to them as well.
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Everyone should share their updates: I have seen teams where senior members of the team use standups to get updates from the team and not share their own updates. This adds friction to the team as people feel disconnected from the senior members. If you want to run a great standup meeting, make sure that senior members too share their updates as well. They can filter out updates which are relevant for the team.
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Keep it short: The agenda of the standup meeting is to bring everyone on the same page. That is it. This meeting should be kept small and everyone should be asked to share updates quickly, ideally 2 mins per update. You should ask your team to not get into the details and take things offline for further discussions.
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Use a project management tool like JIRA: Always use a project management tool like JIRA for project tracking. Make sure someone in the team is sharing the screen or projecting the board. Make sure every update is tagged to a ticket, if there is no ticket, then create one. You can use standups as an opportunity to make sure no effort goes untracked.
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Make your team comfortable to share challenges: Make sure your team feels comfortable bringing up challenges. This is something you have to work on as a leader. If people feel comfortable bringing these topics up in standups, then others can help them out, like a better solution or alternate paths they can take to unblock themselves.
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Setup standup meeting at the start of the day: Make sure your standup is the first meeting of the day. If you want your team to be productive, then follow this. If you keep a standup meeting before the start of their day, then by the end of the meeting everyone in your team will have complete clarity on what they are supposed to do.
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Ask team to come prepared: Ask your team to give a few minutes before the standup to gather their thoughts. This will help them craft their updates. Most ineffective updates are the ones that are shared on the spot. You miss out on something, you pause a lot and waste a lot of time thinking.
Common Pitfalls That You Should Avoid
If you are a first-time manager or a lead who is assigned to drive the standup meetings, you can easily run into a few pitfalls that can turn your standup
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Standup meeting running too long: I have seen standup meetings that run for more than an hour, and the day they can conclude that in 45 mins, they celebrate. Don’t fall into this trap. This is unacceptable. An ideal standup meeting should conclude in 15 minutes or at most 2 minutes per person.
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Everyone shares updates with the manager or lead: Sometimes people think that these updates are for the manager or tech leads, and while sharing updates, they look at just them. Make your team understand that these updates are for everyone and not just for the leadership.
How can I improve standup meetings
If you want to improve your standup meeting then seek feedback from the participants - your team. Ask them what you all as a team can do to make these meetings. You should ask for any feedback for yourself as well. You should then use these feedback pointers to improve yourself.