Does My Team Need a Daily Standup?
The short answer is no, but mileage may vary.
The short answer is no, but mileage may vary.
I can sense the Agile and Scrum purists cracking their knuckles ready to respond to this next statement, but you don’t need standups. I’ll let you breathe.
As with all things in a company, standups are a device used for a particular purpose. They are often misused or unproductive, so why do we keep doing them?
If you are doing standups because “we’ve always done them,” it’s likely worth reviewing with your team to see what benefits everyone is/isn’t getting from them.
I want to highlight that further with a very direct question. Have you ever asked your team if they want to keep doing daily standups? If not, stop right here, send a poll to your team and ask “are our daily standups productive?”
What are daily standups?
Daily standups are intended to be a 15-minute daily check-in to ensure the prioritization of tasks aligns with the team goals for a sprint of work (regardless of sprint length).
Core to standups is ensuring items in review can get wrapped up and items in progress are unblocked.
Regardless of who is facilitating, connecting the dots here can make the difference between a highly productive day and a day of floundering.
Do all teams need daily standups?
Absolutely not. If your team is constantly communicating as issues arise and helping each other get unblocked without an engineering manager, product owner, or scrum master getting involved then congratulations, you’ve got a high-performing, self-managed team.
Does my team need a daily standup?
One of the easiest ways to think through whether your team can benefit from a standup is to ask these questions:
Is work happening in the open?
Does everyone know the priorities for today/this week?
Are priorities shifting?
Is the work well-defined?
If you answered yes, yes, no, and yes to the above, then it is unlikely that you need a daily standup. Otherwise, you’ve got some work to do to fix those answers.
Any other benefits to daily standups?
Especially if you are working on a remote team, a daily standup could be the only time in the day your team interacts. That alone is not a good reason to hold standups though.
The more interactions a team has, the higher the likelihood of that team becoming a high-powered, reliable squad, that trusts each other. Is a standup the only way to do that? Of course not, but if they’re finding it helpful
Especially at the end of a project when a deadline is closing in, things may move fast. If you’re
It’s an easy way to relay new information or shifting priorities but, once again, a standup is not the only way to do this. How does someone that was absent learn about the shift? Async communication creates a historical record of changes, allowing anyone to get caught up.
So, do we need daily standups?
Maybe, maybe not.
If you are using daily standups as a way to track the people on your team, stop it. Be better. Figure out other methods of keeping up with the project.
If your bosses want daily standups to track your folks, tell them to stop it. Figure out what information they’re lacking and determine how to relay that information in a way that’s least intrusive to the team.
If your team is finding value in daily standups, then keep doing them. The only way to know is to ask.
In your next daily standup, think about what you learned that you otherwise would not have known, and dig into the why behind that.
You know what? Just cancel the next one. Make it an async Slack (or communication tool of choice) standup and see what breaks down.
I’ve been on successful teams with no standups, Slack standups, twice-weekly standups, and daily standups. I’ve also been on unsuccessful teams that had daily standups. Every team is different, every project is different, and daily standups should not be a crutch.
The easiest way to get me riled up is to tell me the only way to lead successful projects is to use physcial sticky notes on a physical board and have people physically move them from one location to another. I will fight with anyone that feels that method holds any weight in the modern era of tech.