Standups don’t need to be a meeting
It’s easier to process things that are written into reports than things that are spoken, so to the extent you can get your team to write their daily reports you should. I do this currently with Slack reminders, but the struggle I’m having is that it’s hard to aggregate the data that comes from these updates into reports on progress, so I’m still looking for a better way to do this. The typical format is:
- What did you do yesterday?
- What are you doing today?
- Where are you stuck?
I don’t actually care about what the engineers did yesterday, yesterday is in the past. I hire adults, I expect them to do their jobs, and I have a separate reminder to catch things that they accomplished and want to demo, so I don’t usually ask that first question. I do care about how they feel, and one of my past experiences captured that (for most people) really well but in an indirect way. It can give you insight into their headspace in the morning. You also don’t need to do this daily, depending on team size and time commitments, so adjust the frequency as makes sense for your team. The reminder I’m currently using is:
/remind #eng at 9AM every day Provide status updates in thread:
1. Emoji of the day
2. What are you planning to accomplish today?
3. How can the team help you?
Some engineering leaders really care about highlighting what came up that prevented you from accomplishing #2 above, and you can capture that with a reminder like this:
/remind #eng at 2:30PM every day What did you accomplish today?
If you’re seeing lots of support issues preventing people from accomplishing what they intended to accomplish then you know that you have a support problem you need to solve, etc.
I also mentioned that I capture the team’s accomplishments. The current way I do it is focused around demos, and I’d like to find a more well-rounded approach, but the reminder is something like this:
/remind #eng at 9:15AM every Thursday What have you done this week that you want to share with the whole company?
These together take out a lot of the required scrum meetings that chew up teams’ time in unproductive ways and make it easy to generate engineering reports that are timely and contain current information about team priorities and issues or risks that are presenting themselves.