this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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In my experience, daily standup meetings are largely pointless. It is yet another meeting that should have been an email or slack thread.
It makes sense if you're in an industry with hotspot flare-ups. I work MSP IT and those morning meeting are the way my team asks for help on pressing issues, or rings the alarm bells on business impacting outages. Additionally, Tier I helpdesk and Tier III projects never communicate, so the SUM is where T1 hears about where projects are at (in case they get the breakfix for that item) and T3 knows how swamped T1 is and what mobile techs are out, and T2 gets a chance to tell us if the flow from T1 and T3 into the "escalation sandwich" is too much. And we genuinely have it down pat to 5-10min.
Don't get me wrong, I've had shitty SUM requirements, but when they're done right, it's better than a state of the union email/Teams message.
Still could just be a slack thread or a dashboard. Putting people in a room every day is simply wasteful, even if it "works okay". When I managed a team I hated them, but we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week, so I guess you have to be tactical about when you pull everyone off task to huddle.
It really depends on the group, the workload, and the structure. I’ve got two fairly ADHD employees that love rabbit holes and one that’s great at focusing, but regularly needs some guidance. A daily morning touchpoint meeting like a standup does wonders for getting us all on the same page, making a few quick decisions, and unblocking them all. It’s honestly the best 15-20 min we could spend for productivity and engagement and our most productive meeting of the day.
We also just do it at our desk or virtually on WFH days because it’s a waste of time to walk 5 min to a room and back when we can use that time solving problems.
If we had less ticket churn, or less interruptions from on call/support work, we could probably do it just MWF, but that’s just not in the cards.
Yeah similarly I have no idea what the fuck my boss is doing. Just no communication. That’d be fine if we weren’t the entire engineering department and I routinely have to deal with stuff he did without mentioning to me
So, it's not actually a stand-up meeting.
We do in fact, stand up for it.
People working at home have to stand up? So, their cameras are pointed at their bellies?
Stand up desks are a thing!
In my experience that highlights a difference in each of your "scales"; how long you can concentrate and focus; how often your interruptions are and how aligned your whole team is.
It sounds like you get less interruptions, more focus on items and your team is more aligned. Which means a lower cadence meeting works well, because you can spend more focus time.
For @GlitchyDigiBun@lemmy.dbzer0.com I suspect they are the opposite. More disruptions and less focus means you need a higher cadence and more chances to keep teammates up to date on who is doing what.
Personally, using teams/slack/whatever to keep up to date on this doesn't work. As you can read on message, think someone is on one thing and miss the next message where they've changed tack. The DSU gives everyone a "reset" point. If you can get away with that weekly, absolutely great.
Where I currently work, SRE (but I'm much more tooling and product focussed and less on-call). My on-call teammates need a daily, I can comfortably join them 2 or 3 times a week on their DSU and not miss things.
See, the previous MSP workplace I was at did one a week. If something was pressing the tech would inform the service manager, who would tap the correct resources to assist. The stand up was mostly just reviewing all service ticket requests and making sure nothing was falling through the cracks, so that if someone had a list of lower priority work but got slammed with something intense that took them away from their usual follow ups, those less important jobs could be reassigned to someone with the bandwidth to take them on. Also to ensure that any new tickets are being picked up in a timely fashion (not generally a problem, just doing a health check on it). Took ~1hr across all tickets and techs to review. Almost never longer, but frequently shorter.
It was a small team and we would continually keep in contact throughout the day by phone and slack. Nobody needed baby sitting, we were all professionals and adults.
I only left that position because the owner was cheap and continually denied raises. I didn't see a raise in ~4 years and decided to find something that paid better. I couldn't keep paying my bills with all the COVID inflation; I'd still be there if I was paid better.
Only if handled properly, which a lot of supposed "stand-ups" aren't.
I don't see how you can have a meeting with members of 3 different tiers of support where progress on multiple projects is summarized in a way that someone not on the projects can get anything meaningful out of it, in addition to tier 1 gets to talk about how swamped they are, and tier 2 gets to talk about the flow from tier 1 into some delicious sandwich, and have that only take 5 minutes. I'm guessing that's a minimum of 15 people in the meeting, if you have multiple tiers and everyone's present. To get things done in 5 minutes means that on average everyone only gets to talk for 24 seconds. If you have people who aren't talking, that suggests they don't need to be in the meeting.
In addition, the whole concept of "standing up" for a meeting is stupid. Sure, it means meetings don't last as long, but that's because it's uncomfortable. Plus there are social dynamics issues you introduce between tall people (often men) and short people (often women).
There may be some scenarios where they are helpful, but I think it's possible to do it asynchronous in those situations.
If there's a critical issue that needs to be dealt with ASAP, there should be an escalation process.
You can have reoccurring (or ad hoc) meetings to discuss projects across teams. If the standup is a slack thread, any interested party could view it (based on channel permissions).
It shouldn't be on the individual members to bring up poor processes or that they're overworked in stand-ups. That should flow through their managers
Not trying to be difficult with my responses, just adding my insight from years in tech across a few different positions and companies. I am happy to hear that your team has a process that works!
I disagree, we're all remote so most of the time we have no idea what's going on with other people. Dailies are basically "Ok where are we? What are we doing?" and we're done in 10-15 minutes. Daily really is one of the most useful meetings for me. We experimented with thread approach but it was horible, no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly
I think the length is what’s important. For a long time, my team’s stand ups were going 30-45 minutes and most of it felt pointless (or were discussions that should’ve been on smaller meetings). When I got control over them, I made sure they’re 20 minutes max and I’ll cut people off if they’re talking too long about something only a few people need to input on. Now no one has an issue with the stand up and it’s helped us catch stuff that might’ve been missed otherwise.
My experience is similar; the projects with daily stand-ups are well coordinated and people remain informed while projects without become chaotic and the people become clueless rapidly.
This sounds like an issue with your team and not the process of having a thread approach. If people just ignored the daily standup meeting, like they did the thread, they would also become de-synchronized quickly.
That was our meeting before covid, but suddenly it became a 2-3 hours meeting every Monday morning. It's a nice way to drain your whole energy to start the week
Yeah, had a similar experience in a place I worked where people wrote in slack the things for the day. It was too much and too noise too and people would not read or care. It's too annoying and people felt disconnected anyway.
The important thing is really to have a strong arm and focus on the time. I think all the problems I ever had and they were solved in dailes was exactly because someone was enforcing time and not allowing others to say too much or derail the daily in useless details of their tasks or problems.
I'd probably ask people to literally stand (and not walk) while they're talking. You obviously don't have to do so, but it'll give you a better guideline for how long you should be talking.
Unfortunately there are many juniors that you give the job of doing A to C, and if you come back a week later they'll report they're still stuck at job A, point 1 and didn't want to message anyone, and is something a senior can fix in 5 minutes. Even worse you message them and they just report everything is ok, they're working on it. Of course they never update the status of the project so you never know if they're stuck or just not updating.
That makes daily meetings necessary so they don't lose the entire week and delay the project. Unfortunately more senior members also get dragged in those meetings. It's a frustrating part of working with mixed teams and a "just let me code" mentality.
When I was a manager of a small team it was all junior guys. I had to hammer into their heads to message if they had trouble making progress.
A few times I got the feeling one of the guys was having issues (based on messages). So I called them up on Friday afternoon and they admitted they were way behind because they couldn't get past an issue. But they said "don't worry, I'll work through the weekend to get it done".
I told him "no, you're not working on the weekend. We'll connect on Monday morning and work through the problem together. Just let me know sooner next time so we can get you back on track quicker."
After a couple of those they got the message that it's ok to ask for help and isn't a sign of weakness and they're not gonna get fired for asking.
As a junior engineer, wish management at my last job told me that. Since our team shrunk and lost basically all of our seniors, I felt like I was walking on thin ice with all the expectations I needed to meet. And when they have to train you + give half of the department processes to you and another junior, it can be paralyzing. Didn't help that management was never around for me to ask for help too because they were too busy picking up other issues from people leaving the company in other departments. Ugh. Me being fired was always over my head
Yeah. I've gotten into the habit of checking up on junior engineers around the time they should be asking me questions. If they haven't asked me anything, I know they are lost.
While I agree that a daily standup would help with this, I feel like there's other avenues to approach this problem. If their task is to do A -> C, give them some deadlines and if they don't meet them then become more involved. Have them check in with a senior on the problem. No need to drag the entire team into a standup because the juniors can't figure it out. You can also try to build a culture of asking for help, which is difficult to do. People either think they can figure it out eventually, or they're just slacking.
There's also the very usual problem of the scope of the tasks not being well defined and many times too big, so juniors get overwhelmed and it's difficult for them to focus on small things to actually progress or identify that they are blocked.
I remember well that when I was junior and not having yet a proper notion of when to call it "I'm blocked" since many times it seems one is blocked but is not, like spending 1 or 2 days reading and understanding the code and how all things work are very legitimate things, which are needed to even know what to ask about. But other times I was actually blocked but could not understand that I was because it felt I was just trying to understand the code and was actually going in circles not knowing when to stop.
It's all a balance, but the one important thing to do is communicate about it, not just a "I'm doing it". Usually pairing with someone and take some time to explain the "thought process" and the "current understanding" helps a lot. But, a junior kinda stuck will many times not ask for that time. What I usually do is just after a daily be the one to approach the junior and ask him to pair for a while to help him, without him even asking. Many times this solves the problem.
Generally true. We have a daily 30m “standup” but mostly it’s just us shooting the shot because we’re all remote, and it’s a way to socialize a bit. It’s pretty much optional but most of us usually show up just to chat a bit.
We do our real meeting on Monday mornings
I just want to point out that this may be true for IT or other remote positions (I don't know, I've never worked in IT.) But in some other industries a quick 5-10 minute morning meeting can be essential. Especially in industries/jobs were everyone doesn't have computer access. I know Lemmys all tech bros but I did want to point out that this approach works well in other work environments.
Yeah when I've managed more junior teams I didn't have an official morning meeting but I would make a point to do 3 rounds a day. One in the morning, one before lunch, and one before leaving. People could obviously ask questions any time but you'd be shocked at the number of 'well while you're here' questions you get that they never would have walked over with. Once they gained more experience half the time they wouldn't even take headphones out, just give a thumbs up. Cost me maybe an hour or two a day but def made the team more efficient
So glad I don’t work in IT, all I hear about are endless ‘standup’ ‘agile’ ‘blah blah blah’ meetings.
I work remote and message my manager if I need anything. We talk over Teams almost every day, why would we need a meeting. I work with providing support to a client for their Customs import activity. Just leave me alone and let me do my work!
I think that there's too many tech jobs which are middle management whose job is to make it look like they're doing something while contributing nothing.
Agreed! If you need me you know how to reach me.
I mostly agree, but only because what people usually call "dailies" are actually morning meetings around half and hour. I also had those sometimes, it's horrible.
But on the other side, when you have truly meaningful dailies that do what they are supposed and make the right people talk to each other and are short (5 to 10 minutes), those really are good. I've had those and I like them a lot.
There's many mistakes people make, like letting a single person describe in detail the shit they were doing ( nobody cares about that, it's not a status meeting with your manager), others like focusing on telling things to the manager there which is totally wrong since most times he shouldn't be there or if there should be totally invisible.
The whole point is to make the people on the team talk with each other, either saying they need help on something or they found something that needs further discussion or deciding that another stakeholder on another team or manager needs to get involved to help unlock something. Most times not even everyone needs to speak, if everyone knows what was happening either because they were pairing or working on something already known, it just needs to be skipped ahead.
Anyway, truly most people are right in hating dailies because almost no one gets them done close to right.
I find them valuable to get a quick overview of what other people in the team are doing and maybe struggling since I could help and is a good way to start the day by knowing which priority I need to focus first (usually help in a review because some other colleague really needs to unlock their work). When working remotely one could spend the whole day sometimes focused on their own work and getting a quick overview with the team is good.
Now, don't have dailies with managers or people not related to the team unless they were called specifically to help on some issue. And anyway that should just be a quick thing, like saying "hey I'll need to talk with you maybe after the daily because X"and that's it.
Can't this be accomplished by people using your company's messaging system (hopefully not teams). You shouldn't have to have meetings to force collaboration.
I am all for being up to date with what your team is doing, but there is no way that every member of the team gives a meaningful update in every standup.
It really depends on what is the size of the team, which according to many should not be more than 6 or 7 people. And one core point is not everyone should be forced to say "something", one should speak if they have anything relevant to add.
I've had many meetings where it's just opening the board, asking everyone if everything looks good or anything blocked, everyone says it seems good and the meeting is ended in 2 minutes.
At my work they are necessary. I'm... I guess middle management, you'd say (supervisor in a shop). Our work changes from day to day, nobody doing the same thing from one day to the next, so there's an upper and middle management brief where they outline all the work for the day, assign tasks to specific shops, give general information to be passed along (upcoming events and reminders), then I take that to my shop to assign individual tasks from our shop's workload.
So I attend two of those daily meetings a day (about 5-10 min each) but they are definitely necessary for us.
If this is the entire meeting, can't they just tell you this in an email, phone call, text message, etc and have you delegate it out to your shop?
I know most of my responses in this thread come across as I'm very anti-meetings, but I feel like if you're going to have a meeting, it needs to be beneficial to everyone. People have to take time out of their day, the meetings never start or end on time, and they generally could have just been an email. If you're just passing along information to specific teams, I don't think a meeting is necessary. There's better and more efficient ways to do things.
Theoretically a group phone call would work, but that would be even more challenging than the meeting. In my shop, I need to know what the other shops are doing to provide personnel if needed, a lot of work is shared between shops, and often plans for the day are not developed until that brief. It's not just my shop directly being assigned work, it's a collaborative meeting.
And the meeting that I lead can't be emails, because we have 2 shared computers for anywhere from 2 to 8 people who will be in the shop any given day (and it takes 5-10 minutes to log onto one of our computers. At least.). And in general we don't want them hanging out on computers, we want them tasked and heading out to work as soon as possible.
All in all, it's 15-20 minutes and gives everyone direction for the day. I haven't come across anyone that has found them to not be worthwhile in my workplace.
There's a point. Usually it's to stroke the ego of the managers and reinforce that they can make you do anything, regardless of how useless that activity is.
They can also spend the time interrogating everyone at the same time about how their output isn't good enough and that they should try harder despite having most of their working time being sucked up with unproductive meetings and fucking TPS reports, and filling out time and completion information on their tracking system, all while you're getting random ad-hoc untracked walk-up requests from anyone passing by.
I swear, I spend more time reporting and accounting for the fact that yes, I'm working, like I'm paid to do, and I'm expected to do, than I actually spend on doing the work I've been hired for. Now we have mandatory meetings about whether I'm doing work and why I'm so far behind and/or so slow at getting things done.... maybe I'd be able to get my work finished faster if I didn't have to stop every 10 minutes to report that, yes, I'm actually still working on the tasks I'm assigned, and dealing with Mark for the sixth time today because he walks by my desk and always has some inane complaint/request/question that he just needs to relay to me every time he goes to the bathroom. I'm not your therapist Mark, if you need me to do something, submit it through the tracking system so I don't keep looking like a lazy-assed failure! But no, mark is the step nephew of some c-level and if I actually complain or deny him, he's going to run off to my superior and then I'm going to have more meetings and shit on my plate. I just want to do my job. Leave me the fuck alone.
If your boss is checking in on you that much, that isn't a good sign.
At minimum, I would let your boss know before you do anything for the nephew because it is their job to say your priorities. Hell, you can even blame your boss for doing this. "I'm sorry, but my boss won't let me do that" is a great excuse which puts the responsibility on someone else.
Kind agree. Daily standup is often only valuable if the team doesn't do a lot of communication in other ways. In my team, there's jira comments, pr comments, slack, project meetings. So our standup is just rote "I'm working on X" over and over.
Meeting per videochat with the whole team 1 or 2 times a week is enough.
Yup, this. My last job was nothing but meetings where everyone in the room knew what you were doing but everyone still went around the room to verbally reiterate what they were doing… that day! My brain was melting, it felt like grade 3!
You need as many meetings as you need as many meetings. If you need one, set one up. Don’t set them up just to fill them.
The worst part is they ate into all the work time. So leads were like why isn’t this done, well because you had me in a 3h meeting at end of day, that’s why. But that was apparently your problem, not theirs.
Bruv, we have a Team meeting once a week on mondays and it's basically useless. Once a month would be fine.