Stand-up and deliver

Map the Way

“Misunderstanding the purpose of the meeting can be the biggest challenge to keeping daily stand-ups brief. If the meeting facilitator is unable or unwilling to draw clear lines between brief status updates and deep troubleshooting, then meeting agenda items might not get covered and participants waste their time. My advice to a project manager struggling with daily stand-ups is to do three things ahead of the meeting:

1. Create a meeting agenda, including items to be covered, with item discussion durations.
2. Let attendees know at the beginning that you have some time reserved for offline discussions after all other agenda items have been covered.
3. Distribute the agenda via email to meeting attendees and mention that you will run the meeting according to the agenda.

Once in the meeting, the way to keep daily stand-ups on target is by gently but firmly reminding the team of two things: Unrelated discussions need to be taken offline, and given the time left in the meeting and the number of agenda items still to be covered, it's important to move on.”

—Maxim Pyankov, PMP, IT project manager, 7-Eleven, Dallas, Texas, USA

Appoint a Timekeeper

“I once worked with a team that had daily meetings that lasted more than 30 minutes. I solved this by having people physically stand up during the meetings and appointing one team member a guardian of the time. The role is usually given to someone experienced in these types of meetings. He or she knows enough to judge the relevance of the subject. Their role is to gently propose discussing polemic or irrelevant subjects at another time in a smaller group.

Finally, it's important to explain clearly why we have stand-up meetings and what is expected from the team. Team members need to learn and be convinced of the merits of this practice. I propose a stand-up in order to solve communication problems and usually explain the process at the start of a new project.”

—Simone Mosena, PMP, product development manager, EVS Broadcast Equipment, Seraing, Belgium

Trust and Delegate

“My advice to keep stand-ups on track is to stay out of them. [In the projects I've worked on,] the project manager tends to get into details. Instead of attending, I suggest getting the summary from an appointed team lead. On my projects, for example, that would be a development lead. If you do attend, just listen; let the team run the stand-up.

As a project manager, I encourage team leads to interrupt a team member when he or she is going off on a tangent. And if I have information that I want to get out to the team personally rather than by email, I attend the stand-up and take a moment at the end to address it. Finally, start on time—regardless of who is actually present. Each team member's time is valuable, and if you treat it as such, then your team becomes more efficient and effective.”

—James S. Plastow, PMP, senior project manager, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a PMI Global Executive Council member, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Get Creative

“Stand-ups should be introduced not as a required daily task, but as something new to do where sharing and learning can happen. One way to promote learning is to develop a point system—low or high numbers that show whether the meeting participants' comments were quick and relevant. It's not a grading mechanism, but a way to provide constructive feedback. For example, after someone brings the team up to speed in a quick, clear and to-the-point manner, the project manager might say, ‘Plus 9. Good stuff. John, follow up with a 10-pointer.’ Or, if someone provides an update in a tiresome way that leaves us with questions, I might throw out, ‘Plus 2 points for the confusion. Clear it up—you lost us halfway.’ Treat the stand-up as a learning moment.

Short and Sweet  Stand-ups gain ground.

Sources: 7th Annual State of Agile Development Survey, VersionOne, 2013; The State of Scrum: Benchmarks and Guidelines, Scrum Alliance, 2013

Another idea is to do random stand-ups during the day. They're a great opportunity to pause the day and get the flow going again. With random stand-ups, people want to keep them short to get back to what they were doing.”

—Nikos Rentas, PMP, CEO and director of corporate development, Satner Hosting Solutions, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Stick to Time

“Most effective stand-up meetings occurred when we respect the timing, always holding it at the same time of the day. A tip to keep the meeting short and at the same time: Schedule it around 11:45 a.m. That way you still have four more hours of the workday to address any issue raised. If you have the meeting at the end of the day, people can forget to follow up on a problem.

Also, having a meeting facilitator helps guarantee that you don't use the meeting to solve problems, just to raise issues to be addressed after the meeting. Some people may try to explain an issue during the stand-up and others will attempt to solve it. The facilitator has to work hard to keep the meeting brief.”

—Lúcia Mazoni, Olympic projects superintendent, Government of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil