An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings(weblog.alexgodin.com) |
An Alternative to Stand-up Meetings(weblog.alexgodin.com) |
For me, I feel like the benefit of a stand-up is exactly that it forces everyone to pay attention and meet for 5 min, not just so that everything important gets communicated, but that everyone knows everyone else heard it. And people can ask important questions and know everyone else heard the concern and answer as well.
Believe it or not, people stopped ignoring my emails.
If you're going to ignore emails at work, be prepared for the consequences.
If you don't want me to email you, tell me where else to go for the info. If you want to hoard knowledge, and you don't want to answer emails, you're gonna get the escalation.
How about simply having a company policy that everyone should MVCC their decisions based on received email "transactions"? I.e., if someone sends out an email, then everyone else MUST (in the RFC sense of MUST) read it and digest it before making any new decisions. It still operates asynchronously--you can finish whatever you were head-down working on before checking your email--but you have to check it before you move on to whatever comes after that.
Or, in more cynical terms: fire everyone who ignores these emails until the problem corrects itself.
My rule is: if something affects my work, put it in my TODO list. If I am a Devops engineer, reading emails or standing up in a circle (jerk) pretending to listen carefully and understand what designer X, mobile developer Y and product manager Z did the day before or plan to do today is a waste of my time and theirs.
Plus other people have already made (bad) decisions and started working on stuff that (negatively) affects you because you were busy "head-down working".
These are the problems that stand ups are supposed to help fix.
The "bugs" he sees in the process, "synchronous, everyone needs to be in the room (or on the phone), and often after the meeting much of the content is lost" -- those are features.
People need to synchronize for social purposes. They need body language to help debug subtle performance issues. They need to have problems shoved in their face to either act on or forget.
That's all great stuff.
If you're leaving a paper trail that management can go back through (even in theory), then it will get sanitised, and people will try and make themselves look good. The further you get from reality, the more value your "stand ups" will lose.
There's a good reason for the "pigs and chickens" analogy.
This works great if you have a reasonable number of people working largely on independent areas, or if your pace is slow enough to drive consensus through email.
If you need to reach team consensus regularly and quickly, e.g. on architectural or design decisions, synchronous standups are still better, even virtual ones over IRC or FaceTime or whatever. (If you hear people saying "wait, why/when did we do that?" a lot, you may be in this situation even if you'd rather not be.)
I'm not a standup (or capital-a Agile, bleh) zealot by any means, but if you've got more than two people working closely on an area, and you're going quickly, regular and delineated synchronous communication still beats email threads for efficiency.
"An alternative to stand-up meetings" -> We use our product. Oh, shameless plug, try it.
What's even more frustrating is how they game the upvote to reach front-page. So, not only it's a disguised article, but it also hide more interesting ones.
</end-of-grumpy-rant>
However, every time someone proclaims to have found a better alternative for the stand-up, I always go looking for the "you-were-doing-it-wrong" red flag. One thing stand out:
"No need to take notes in a stand-up or bother someone with questions [...]"
Notes? Bothering someone with questions? These are hints that there was a dysfunctional stand-up in place to begin with, in which case it's hard to judge how well the alternative works.
In my experience, mailing in works fine as a workaround for situations where having a physical standup is impossible or disruptive, but certainly no equal alternative to spending a few minutes actually sharing information face to face with all the non-verbal high bandwidth communication that goes with it. One look, one gesture can say more than an entire email.
That pretty much nails it. I'll admit though I hate standups. Any value it has as a concept is completely lost in its practice.
Edit: Looks like this "conversation" idea may have jumped the shark too. Management consultants are already trying to horn in on this technique (http://www.amazon.ca/The-Art-Conversation-Neglected-Pleasure...). Pretty soon we'll need "conversation masters" and some sort of certification process.
This sounds great as long as you keep the spirit of the standup alive - a standup is for the whole team, not management, and should be a quick read.
A scrum-master's job is remove impediments, and thereby allowing developers to concentrate on development. Mandating that developers generate and then participate in a lot of email noise is counterproductive.
Once thing I noticed that I have a lot of information at the end of the day, and not the beginning. First thing in the morning I barely know my name, about the worst time to ask me anything. So I've always found the morning fascination a bit odd.
Contrary to popular opinion on HN, regular communication is important for most (if not all) business activities.
I mean, I guess it is.... it's in particular, an alternative that was very common before stand-ups were invented and became popular, which was judged ineffective and inefficient by those who invented stand up meetings. But, sure.
In other news, planning everything out in advance is an alternative to agile development.
a meeting is held as a stand-up in order to encourage brevity.
so the poster is looking for alternatives to morning status meetings, not stand-up meetings.
stand-up meetings are just fine. thankyouverymuch
Even just a heads up that something important is coming down the line can save you hours or days of work "Oh, I thought you were cc'ed in on that email..."