{"id":7875,"date":"2016-10-24T12:37:28","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T09:37:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/?p=7875"},"modified":"2023-03-17T19:24:47","modified_gmt":"2023-03-17T16:24:47","slug":"stand-up-meetings-railsware-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/stand-up-meetings-railsware-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Stand-up meetings: Railsware way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"intro-text\">While I don&#8217;t think that anyone who has ever used any modification of <a href=\"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/what-is-agile-product-development\/\" title=\"\">Agile methodology<\/a> would require definition of a stand-up meeting, its still needed to have some base to start from. Let&#8217;s say this is a team meeting, usually done standing, so physical inconvenience would force people to be short in their updates :) I wouldn&#8217;t focus on main benefits of stand-ups; instead, I would rather share how to make your stand-ups better, more effective and enjoyable based on the experience and practices we&#8217;ve had at Railsware over the years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, stand-up is a recurrent meeting for the team working on the same subject. Its goal is to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>keep each team member on the same page<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>be updated about every team member progress, plans, current questions and things that block the progress<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>answer current questions and resolve blockers or change direction of work if blockers are unresolvable<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Stand-up meeting should follow a few simple (but still important) rules:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>be recurrent<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>be reasonably short<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>be informative<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>do not dive deep into specific details<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>be on time<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>include all team members<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>have defined structure and discipline<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>be well documented<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>write notes beforehand<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>should have a dedicated lead<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a closer look at each of these points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Be recurrent<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>The sense of stand-up meetings is in the recurrence. Doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s daily, weekly, bi-weekly, etc. The team itself defines how work intensity should be reflected in stand-ups\u2019 recurrence. For instance, if the team is allocated full-time, most efficient stand-ups, most likely, would be daily ones since work progress changes significantly per day of work. On the contrary, if progress over time seems not that sufficient, team may consider doing weekly stand-ups. Main point of the recurrence should fulfil the simple principle: subject\u2019s progress should not change significantly between two adjacent meetings, so that the team could easily keep an eye on direction and progress of its work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Be reasonably short<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Since stand-up is a recurrent meeting with the whole team participating, it cannot afford to take significant amount of time. Depending on the number of participants, it may take up to 20-30 minutes max (~3-4 minutes per member\u2019s update adding 10 minutes for questions session). Otherwise you would be surprised how much it costs for your company when daily stand-up takes 1 hour and includes 10 people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Be informative<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>According to the goal of stand-up meetings (which is team members&#8217; synchronisation), each team member\u2019s update should serve the main goal: informing teammates on what are your current focuses, plans, issues, questions. Following the principle \u201cdo the update in a way you would like to hear other\u2019s update\u201d would help the team to reach this result.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Do not dive deep into specific details<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This rule relates both to \u201cBe informative\u201d and \u201cBe reasonably short\u201d. There should be a compromise between providing enough information for the team to be updated and jumping into specific details which take a lot of stand-up\u2019s time and risk to be redundant for some of your colleagues. If you feel the urge to discuss certain topics, add the point to questions and use the stand-up to ask colleagues and decide who would like to participate in separate discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Be on time<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Situation when 5-6 people wait for the one who is late should not break stand-up\u2019s schedule. Just respect your colleagues\u2019 time and don\u2019t be late on stand-up. Otherwise, ignoring this rule would put \u201cBe reasonably short\u201d rule under the big risk.<br>Additionally, stand-up\u2019s time should be strict. It\u2019s up to the team, but advice would be not to wait for those who are late to start the stand-up. They can join and will be punished by not hearing first updates. Intelligent person would understand that being late for team\u2019s meeting is a disrespect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Include all team members<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>According to stand-up\u2019s goal, each team member should be present in order to have clear image of current state of the team, progress etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Have defined structure and discipline<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Following this would help your team keep stand-up as efficient as possible. Adjust structure and discipline as it fits your team and encourage your colleagues to follow it. Moreover, sticking to certain structure and discipline makes your stand-up organised, informative and reasonably short.<br>Default structure of the stand-up is as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>personal updates\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>what was done from previous stand-up<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>what is planned to be done until next stand-up<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>questions you would like to ask (preferably with direct mentions, if possible)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>blockers you currently have<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>notes (optional; used for anything that doesn\u2019t appear as points above)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>declaring the next person in queue (to avoid \u201cwho\u2019s next?\u201d questions, person who finished his(her) personal update explicitly declares the next speaker)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>questions session\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>stand-up lead goes by personal updates top to bottom, reading questions and blockers and mentioned team members answer\/discuss\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>if the question discussion goes long, lead would propose to organise separate meeting for it setting a responsible who would organise and lead the event<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>each question should have the written answer as soon as the team reaches agreement on it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Until the questions session, no interruptions (like answering questions) is allowed, everyone proceeds with personal update including stating his\/her questions but questions&#8217; answers follow after all personal updates are done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Be well documented<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Documenting meetings helps a lot in many different cases:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>as a history log and the reference for decisions taken on questions session<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>as a domain knowledge for other teams that would like to understand the context of your work<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>as a clear source of the contextual updates for team members who were absent<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>as an easy source of time reports nodes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Write notes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing notes for the stand-up helps to structure your update and read it short and informative instead of recalling things feverously right at the time of stand-up. This significantly reduces probability of forgetting to mention things done, plans or, which is most important, ask question or state a substantial blocker. Surely, you can reach out to your team members later, but why not use stand-up for the purpose you actually have it for?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Write notes beforehand<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Notes should be written before the stand-up to avoid distraction of the person who writes notes during other\u2019s update. This would significantly reduce the efficiency of the update. You may consider to set up some alarm or notification to remind you to prepare your notes 10-15 minutes prior to the meeting. Also, it helps to run stand-up smoothly, since it\u2019s easy to see who should be updating next after you\u2019re finished by the notes order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Should have a dedicated lead<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>In order to stick to the structure and keep the discipline, stand-up should be led by a single responsible person who keeps an eye on following stand-up rules and reaching stand-up\u2019s goal. The importance of the supervisor decreases significantly with time, since doing good stand-ups becomes a part of team\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Stand-up meeting is a pretty efficient and useful tool among other Agile development practices, however you can always improve it using some hints described above or come up with your own ones that fit your team better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I don&#8217;t think that anyone who has ever used any modification of Agile methodology would require definition of a stand-up meeting, its still needed to have some base to start from. Let&#8217;s say this is a team meeting, usually done standing, so physical inconvenience would force people to be short in their updates :)&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"coauthors":["Dmitry Pliska"],"class_list":["post-7875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-management"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"categories_data":[{"name":"Product Management","link":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog?category=management"}],"post_thumbnails":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-content\/themes\/railsware\/vendors\/images\/article-thumbnail-default.jpg","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7875"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16008,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7875\/revisions\/16008"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7875"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/railsware.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}