UPDATE: Publishing this old draft I found. Early thoughts on stand-ups. Over the years I've realised stand-ups are evil and one of the worst forms of micro-managing a team. Will pen my current thoughts in detail soon!
Its very tricky to deal with developers or for the developer to deal with himself for that matter. Most software companies have this very casual work culture and no one likes to be micro managed. There are times when this becomes a pain to the product manager, and even the developer feels he is getting off track.
Status reports monthly, weekly or even daily are the usual resorts. But the more friendly version is the standup meeting. In a typical cube setup of a team, everyone stands up and takes turn on updating the rest of the team on his status. While this is an excellent idea the timing of this can go terribly wrong.
Until I did it myself when I was leading a team, these stand-ups used to happen early in the morning. One of the reason being the manager wanted everyone to be at desk early. A status would mean, what I did since we stood last and what I plan to do next.
The morning time has couple of issues
- still not everyone is in
- you can get away with fancy deadlines for EOD today
- what you worked on yesterday isn't fresh in your minds
- one tends to defer work till later in the night
The later in the day stand up OTOH
- gives a nice incentive to work hard and present it end of the day
- don't waste to much time during the day, for end of day you'd be asked a question
I just started with this, and so far its worked well. I'd write more on how this approach goes in coming times! And may be with more teams, if I am able to inspire.
Its very tricky to deal with developers or for the developer to deal with himself for that matter. Most software companies have this very casual work culture and no one likes to be micro managed. There are times when this becomes a pain to the product manager, and even the developer feels he is getting off track.
Status reports monthly, weekly or even daily are the usual resorts. But the more friendly version is the standup meeting. In a typical cube setup of a team, everyone stands up and takes turn on updating the rest of the team on his status. While this is an excellent idea the timing of this can go terribly wrong.
Until I did it myself when I was leading a team, these stand-ups used to happen early in the morning. One of the reason being the manager wanted everyone to be at desk early. A status would mean, what I did since we stood last and what I plan to do next.
The morning time has couple of issues
- still not everyone is in
- you can get away with fancy deadlines for EOD today
- what you worked on yesterday isn't fresh in your minds
- one tends to defer work till later in the night
The later in the day stand up OTOH
- gives a nice incentive to work hard and present it end of the day
- don't waste to much time during the day, for end of day you'd be asked a question
I just started with this, and so far its worked well. I'd write more on how this approach goes in coming times! And may be with more teams, if I am able to inspire.
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