How to avoid stand up… comedy

Thanks Pete from Perth for your #minutewithmarcus question on one of my favourite meetings.

“Hey Marcus tell me more about the daily stand up and what are some of your top tips for success“

Yes it might have come from #agile but the benefits have been seen from waterfall project teams, mining squads through to nursing teams by way of increasing the flow of communication and empirical improvement through transparency, inspection and adaptation.

At Twenty2 we put a lot of effort into getting this meeting right in our training and coaching as I believe this can be an early enabler towards high performance.

So here’s the science..

A daily stand-up meeting is a day-to-day meeting among all the members of the team. Its main purpose is to know the current progress and performance of every team member that works on tasks. The meetings take place mostly in the morning and usually involves product owners, developers, and the scrum master.

These meetings usually take place for the following reasons:

👉To know what was done yesterday and what is the plan for today.

👉To provide a better understanding of goals.

👉To make sure that every team member is working toward the same goal.

👉To bring problems of team members into focus so that problems can be addressed quickly.

👉To bring everyone up to date on the information and help the team to stay organized.

And here’s the art…

It’s funny how often I’ll hear people worry they don’t have time for this, when facilitated well I’ve ran stand ups with 10 people that have lasted less than 5 minutes and gives us total visibility as opposed to 9 separate one hour 121’s on any given day

Aside from the process benefits listed above, I like this meeting as it also really helps build personal connection. By adding a some check in to the start of the meeting we are improving our collaboration and our communication. Working with a team during covid and lockdown the stand up become an opportunity to do a mental health check and really galvanised us.

For extra high performance points

I’ll allow 30 mins for the stand up and make full use of the stopwatch. If we finish early it’s a great opportunity to grab coffee/take a stroll or just build on those team dynamics.

Hopefully that answers your question Pete. If it helps I’m happy to facilitate your first/next stand up for you.