Standup meetings - the first shift left
Distributed standup meetings are painful. Since these meetings are about conveyance, for a group with a strong relationship, they are ideal candidates to shift left. Here's what to do.
- Use the signup, tasking and commenting features of your project management tool to make updates continuous.
- Automate the standup using tools like Geekbot or Butler.
- Avoid making it a one-size-fits-all meeting. For leaders and higher level managers create summarised reports of progress so they don't get overwhelmed.
My ex-colleague Jason Yip wrote the most famous article about standup meetings. That was way back in 2006 - 16 years before this post. I think you’ll agree that a lot has happened since. The biggest inflection point, however, was the pandemic triggered remote work revolution of 2020 and beyond. Suddenly, those short, early morning gatherings around a physical wall in the office became long, painful, teeth pulling sessions over Zoom. Distributed standups are just a pain in the wrong place. Tell me if you recognise any of these problems.
Standups should be 15 minutes or fewer. I don’t recall too many distributed standups that are any less than 30 minutes. Heck, I’ve been in standups that are longer!
Physical standups move fast because you’re either passing a speaking token or going around in a circle and speaking on your turn. In remote standups, people get confused about whose turn it is next. So either it’s a project lead prompting people to speak or, after an uncomfortable silence, people volunteer with “Ok, I’ll go next.”
Often, these meetings are a mere formality. Since many people attend with their video off and on mute, it’s hard to tell if anyone’s paying attention. Even if people are listening, it’s hard to build engagement when all you see is an avatar on Zoom.
It’s no longer a standup! Everyone attends these meetings sitting down and so, there’s no incentive to keep it short; unless of course there’s a meeting right after!
All this pain would be worth it if there was an obvious benefit. If you think hard though, it’s tough to justify why, with all the collaboration tools we have, we need standup meetings to give us answers to the following questions.
- What did we do yesterday?
- What will we do today?
- What obstacles are we facing, if any?
If you’re using your tools well, then you should have real time answers to (a) and (b). And if (c) is really important, then why are we waiting for standup to get help? The actual killer with remote standups is when these happen across time zones. Imagine working till 10:30pm in Bangalore, just so you can do a standup with your colleagues in San Francisco, to tell them the answers to a, b and c. Ugh!
By the way, spare a thought for the people who may miss a standup. No one documents these meetings. So if someone misses the standup, that’s it right there. Wait to hear a few days later, “Oh, didn’t you know? We agreed ____ at standup on Thursday last week!”
Let me just say this. If there’s one meeting you can easily cut from your rituals - it’s got to be the standup. In this post I’ll discuss a few easy ways for you to radiate the same information that you expect from a standup, minus all the pain of the meeting. As an individual, you’ll get back a few minutes of your life every day. The bigger benefit? You can share updates continuously, and at your own pace. From a team perspective, you’ll be able to create an audit trail of communication and, of course, plough back the time savings into deep work. If that sounds worthwhile, let’s get started.
Use the project management tool’s features
The first bit of discipline to inculcate is using the features of your project management tool. Most of these tools allow people to sign up for work, “task it out” and then use comments to have discussions about that piece of work, in context. An easy way to radiate progress is as follows.
Sign up. Whenever someone picks up a piece of work, they also sign up to it on the project management tool. That way, if anyone looks at work in progress on the tool, they know what everyone’s up to.
Tasking. The first thing someone does when they sign up to something new is to task it out. When they complete a task, they just check the box. So if anyone wants to know the status of that piece of work, they just need to look at the checklist.
Open discussion. All discussion about a piece of work happens on the ticket associated with it. Need help? @mention the person who needs to help you out. If you need urgent help (it better be urgent), call them on their phone. Once you’ve got what you need, throw your notes into the comments. You’ve got yourself a nifty audit trail in place.
@mentions to get attention. If you want to radiate information about the task to anyone else, add comments about that as well. Tools like Jira allow you to @mention the entire team if necessary, though I’d use those notifications sparingly.
If you think about it, this level of atomic discipline helps answer many of the standup questions already and allows people to be reflective about their own work.
Automate the ritual
I understand if you still like the safety of a ritual to get your standup digest. That’s ok, there are ways to do this while being asynchronous. You need to implement a two-part solution.
Automate the standup. With IFTTT and Zapier, you can automate pretty much everything these days. However, I have two out of the box solutions for you. If you use Jira and Slack, then you can try Geekbot. If you’re using Trello, then the Butler functionality on it can help you create a standup workflow. In fact, my current team does all its standup updates on Trello, courtesy Butler. Whatever you do, make sure that all the updates go to one place - e.g. a #status channel on Slack, or a specific list on Trello so people can control how frequently they get notifications.
Agree on team commitments. An async standup is pointless if people don’t post their updates within a reasonable timeframe and if no one reads these updates. Depending on how distributed you are, your agreements will be different. That said, it’s important to agree on a time by which everyone will post their updates and a time by which everyone will read them.
That’s it, no biggie. You just need to follow through with your commitments from that point on. And by the way, if you don’t use Jira, Slack or Trello and your company doesn’t allow you to use IFTTT or Zapier, there are other ways to do this. A shared collaborative document, or a form connected to a spreadsheet, can do the trick as well. Tools like Basecamp and Fellow allow for automated standups and you’ll encounter specialised tools like Range too. The world’s your oyster - find your own adventure!
Keep it relevant
I remember talking about asynchronous standups to a senior consultant some time back and her response to me was, “Oh I’ve tried that, and I find all those updates so overwhelming!” I left that meeting perplexed. Later, it occurred to me that she was a high-level manager and the low-level updates from various teams were not just overwhelming for her, but also quite irrelevant. My takeaway - the standup is for the dev team. The moment you try to make it a one-size-fits-all meeting, you’ll either dilute its purpose or you’ll make it useless for some people. Jason’s original article on standups has some wise words.
“Not all forms of reporting will be, nor should be, covered by the stand-up format. For example, overall project progress would be better communicated with a Big Visible Chart such as burn-down, burn-up, cumulative flow diagram, etc.”
When you want to shift left on the spectrum of synchronousness, standups should be amongst the first meetings you take async. When you start off, the lag will probably feel disconcerting. Get used to it - asynchronous work is about making peace with lag. If you’re leading your team’s shift left, then you may need to remind some team members to throw in their updates. That’s ok - once they settle in to the new habit and they see the benefits, you can get out of their hair. You may also hear of a gazillion “other benefits” you got from standup meetings. While perhaps those meetings weren’t standups anymore, be empathetic to those concerns and keep an open mind. Find alternatives to achieve those benefits outside the standup. After all, if this is amongst the first practices you shift left on, you want your team to feel good about it.