Is Your Daily Standup Meeting Hurting Teamwork?

Gil Broza specializes in increasing organizational agility and team performance with minimal risk and thrashing. Dozens of companies seeking transformations, makeovers or improvements have relied on his pragmatic, modern and respectful support for customizing agile in their contexts. His book "The Agile Mind-Set" helps practitioners go beyond process and adopt a true agile approach to work. His book "The Human Side of Agile" is a practical book on leading agile teams to greatness. These days, several of the world's largest organizations are having him train hundreds of their managers in technology and business (up to VP level) on practical agile leadership. Get Gil's popular 20-session mini-program "Something Happened on the Way to Agile" free at OnTheWayToAgile.com.

  Agile   Scrum  

It’s been my experience that in its popular, standard form, the Daily Scrum (“the Standup”) hurts teamwork. Follow me to understand how and why the meeting causes that, and discover alternatives that work better.

The Ubiquitous Practice
As an external coach/consultant, I have had the privilege to observe dozens of new agile teams in action. The daily standup meeting is a process element that all of them have adopted easily, even if they’d received virtually no agile training. Most of those teams believe they are supposed to gather every day and while standing, each person must answer three questions while standing: What have I done since yesterday? What will I do today? What’s in my way?

Observable Trouble
Team members who believe this are likely to:

1. not quite understand why this practice exists (or mistakenly believe it’s the agile form of reporting status)
2. show up with little enthusiasm, mumble or rattle off some information to the ScrumMaster or project manager, and space out when others are talking
3. never really get to the third (and most important) question, which is meant to expose barriers to team flow
4. complain about having too many meetings, and rail against agile in general

The Damage You Can’t See
These are just the observable effects. What worries me more is that even when …

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