Since doing my Certified Scrum Master course I’ve adopted daily stand-up meetings with my team. I’ve kept them to a maximum of 15 minutes and go quickly around the team looking at yesterday’s progress, work planned today and any blockers. I’ve realised that although useful, daily is too often. Not enough changes in a day. Have others found this to be true?
The other observation I’d make is that the meetings need to be early in the morning before people start work. However, my team start at different times because of travel distances and family arrangements, so it’s quite difficult to get everyone together early. I’ve tried running them later in the day, but they lose their impact and usefulness. Do others have thoughts on overcoming this?
I’m aware that in purest terms you should only do the round-the-team updates. However, I’ve added an update of the project plan, including the percentage of each task complete. It’s useful to have this information in your back pocket when talking to stakeholders.
Overall, I think daily stand-ups are a useful aspect of Agile PM, but I’m finding frequency and timing an issue.
Does anyone have any thoughts, ideas or techniques they could share in this area?
Thanks,
Duncan
Do You Hold Daily Stand-up Meetings?
My suggestion would be to go with the time that is suitable for everybody, I agree with you that it would be best if they could be done at the beginning of the day. But, imagine your team as a virtual one in different time zones. At that point of time having access to the entire team makes most sense.
HTH.
Cheers.
HTH.
Cheers.
How about a conference call with the team?
Does a daily stand-up need to be the whole team in a room, you tell me? I can definately think a facing meeting is more personal but a conference call might get around the issue of trying to get all members in a room together.
Does a daily stand-up need to be the whole team in a room, you tell me? I can definately think a facing meeting is more personal but a conference call might get around the issue of trying to get all members in a room together.
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begeland
For me it depends on where we are on the project. If we're working through something critical like some break/fix testing or trying to break through some key performance roadblock as deployment nears on an IT rollout project, then daily (or more often) is necessary. As a rule, for me though, I generally have weekly internal team meetings to gather this information from my team members as daily is too often to be of value. Since nearly every project I manage is remote with a virtual team scattered in multiple timezones it would usually be too much of a challenge to pull of daily meetings anyway.
Of course, in between the weekly meetings I'm in daily (sometimes hourly) communication with team members electronically if the situation warrants it. Communication is key and my team usually tells me that they get more emails from me than other PMs they work with (not sure if that's always a compliment though).
Of course, in between the weekly meetings I'm in daily (sometimes hourly) communication with team members electronically if the situation warrants it. Communication is key and my team usually tells me that they get more emails from me than other PMs they work with (not sure if that's always a compliment though).