Your Daily Standup Should be Boring

If you are a Lean/Agile team you probably have a daily standup / scrum that you are trying to complete in 15 minutes or less. You might even be “standing up” in that effort. You are most likely failing, and your average standup runs for half an hour or longer. And I’m not even counting the “meeting after the standup”.  You have tried various techniques the plethora agile books prescribe, and it does work for a week or two but then just falls back to the old pattern.

Have you wondered why?

The key is to first understand why you even need the standup in the first place. Then work assiduously to eliminate every single reason to have the standup, but not stop it.

You are then likely to find a couple of things:

· There’s not much to talk about at the standup. In fact, it’s probably boring
·   Your standups are getting done in 15 minutes or less

This is a great state to aspire – a non-eventful standup without drama.

How do you get to this stage?

Let’s first look at what’s happening in the standup today. What topics are being discussed? Very likely:

• Status
• Problems
• Solutions
• Decisions

So, that’s what’s eating time in the standup. The crucial question to ask is why is this coming up in the standup? Obvious answer – because people didn’t raise it earlier. Why didn’t they raise it earlier? Your team should be raising the issue when the event happened. Not wait till the standup.

Thus, the vital improvement to be implemented here is to raise issues when the event occurred. Not hold back till the standup which is usually a once a day event.

Why is this important?

If you are thinking that we are looking to save a few minutes at the standup – that’s not the driver. Although, that is desirable, that’s not the main goal. The real cost of an extended standup is not the extra minutes, but:

·        Disruption to the flow by not resolving issues soon as they occur
·        Cost of delay by waiting for the standup

And if you put in processes in place to resolve problems when they occur, empower people to make decisions quickly, there’s going to be very little to discuss at the standup. Your standup might be boring. A standup that’s boring for the right reasons is a good thing.

Work hard to make the standup boring. But don’t eliminate it. What remains to be discussed in the standup now is probably what should be discussed in the standup.