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How much value are your team members getting from your stand up meetings

I've run two projects (24 months) through agile inspired methodologies and watched two other teams. I've noticed that most team members don't seem to be getting value out of the stand-up. I have noticed that the leader or leaders do get value as they are coordinating dependencies.

Many of the team members, in all the teams I've watched, suffer from lack of initiative. If they can defer responsibility, they do. Not to say that they don't do great jobs as individuals, its just that they prefer to have a leader.

Is the behavior I'm seeing an artifact of the teams I'm observing or a common behavior ?

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4 answers

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d. cooksey

Personally I find a brief stand-up meeting in the morning to be very useful for keeping the whole team informed of potential issues, significant code changes, or environment modifications. If no one has any updates the meeting takes only a minute or two, so the day's work isn't significantly interrupted.

I'm not sure what level of initiative you're discussing. Do you mean that no one takes personal responsibility to get a feature done, or are you talking about responsibility within a different area? An example would be helpful.

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jim rush
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I believe that most are taking individual responsibility for their tasks, but not necessarily for the success of the story as a whole.

d. cooksey
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We experimented with a ‘story shepherder’ concept that gives a single developer overall responsibility for seeing a story through from creation to completion. You might want to try this, it works a bit better than group responsibility.

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  • 3

daryl kulak

I would avoid blaming the people themselves and look at the process. With what you've told us, I have two initial thoughts.

One is that the standup is at the wrong time of the day. If you are interrupting the logical cycle of developers them they will always be kind of reluctant to participate because they just want to get back to their coding. Managers tend to organize their days in segments of one hour. Makers (developers) tend to want to spend at least four hours uninterrupted.

Paul Graham, venture capitalist and developer, talks about this here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

For this reason, I tend to set standups for around 11am, because my teams come in at various times in the morning (some at 7am, some at 9:15am), so there isn't one "top of the morning" time for everyone.

The second thought is that the manager might be keeping people from asking questions about other people's statuses. If anyone is chastised whenever they ask a question about another person's status, that could kill the energy of the standup quickly. My diagnosis for a healthy standup is that someone asks someone else a question at least once or twice in each standup. If no one is asking any questions (except the managers asking), then the standup is sick.

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  • 2

mike_15

I think one of the most challenging parts of Scrum is effectively communicating as most programmers are introverts. The team should collectively define what they want to get out of the daily scrum (during a retrospective, at the end of a sprint or mid-sprint if necessary) and hold each other accountable to this.

Seems like a smell that the "leaders" are getting value but the team is not (see The Daily Scrum is for the Scrum Master)

It is also possible that the team is communicating at such a level that the Daily Scrum is unnecessary. If so, then perhaps external reporting should be handled a different way. But my guess is that they feel like the Daily Scrum is for the "leaders" and therefore don't get the value that they should (self fulfilling prophesy of sorts).

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jim rush
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Thank you for the Wiki entry. I suspect part of our challenge is in the second purpose. Commitments and meeting them. While there is a focus on individual contributions, there is a lack of overall ownership. The team is often leaving all aspects of leadership and coordination to the Scrum Master.

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  • 0

steve conley [ Editor ]

We get a lot of value from the stand up meeting. We do this daily at 9.30am and we stand in a circle and say what we did yesterday and what we aim to achieve today, including anything blocking us from our aims.

I read a lot of articles which suggest gathering about a task wall but as we don't have one, we don't do that.

Some days they can be a bit quick and a bit samey but we always seem to throw a few questions in there and listen to what each other has to say. We never miss stand up and the day never feels properly started until we do it. Some days you can even find out what you'll be doing that day from the stand up.

The stand up should never be for the team leaders or managers, it's for the full team. Every one speaks and I don't think you should even be able to tell who the manager is during this 'meeting'.

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