Daily Meetings Toolkit for Engineering Leaders of the Post-Covid World
Alex Kistenev
Co-founder of Standuply, the top app for Jira, Slack & Teams | Agile Meetups Org. | Startup Advisor | EO Barcelona
As we enter the post-Covid world, life returns to the norm. But the work is not, especially for engineering leaders. Back then, 'remote work' was a fancy cake some developers could think of, and few had it on their tables. Today, we all experienced the ups and downs of working from home, and guess what?
Developers liked it — a lot.
No need to read surveys to prove that — you probably heard it from your team members a dozen times. And every time you get a request to work from home, it doesn't feel right as you recall the Agile Manifesto:
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
Agile Manifesto
Who could think of an Agile team where one dev is coming to the office at noon, another stays up to midnight, and the third one is working part-time, keeping an eye on his children in another office room. "What nonsense!" Jeff Sutherland and his crew would say.
But today, it's the new norm when devs work from home, which is far from the 9 am - 6 pm working routine we used to. Now, we call it a hybrid team, and if you don't like it, half of your team will probably find another company that's fine with that.
The real challenge for engineering leaders of today is not fighting this trend but finding ways to manage hybrid teams effectively without additional overhead. There is the good news — it's possible embracing a slightly new management approach.
For the past six years, we’ve faced many questions about best practices in distributed teams. As a result, we have helped thousands of tiny startups and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies to manage their engineering teams with Standuply.
In this article, we'd like to examine daily meetings and how to run them with distributed teams. Moreover, you can use it as an example to apply to any other hybrid team process.
Consistency is The Key Aspect of a Daily Standup Meeting
Daily standup meetings are short, regularly held gatherings where team members come together, review progress, and uncover blockers.
These meetings can significantly increase progress, allow you to identify problems quickly, and help maintain communication within the team.
The purpose of the Daily Scrum is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal and adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary, adjusting the upcoming planned work.
Scrum.org
We found that the effectiveness of standups relies on the way they are organized rather than the fact of running them. It's essential for everyone on a team to understand the purpose of the daily standup meeting.
Committing to a meeting once every day might seem counterintuitive at first. But the standup’s bitesize, straight-to-the-point agenda is more efficient versus other meeting formats. It starts working well only if the process is consistent.
However, keeping consistency is hard when a team is spread across time zones or working on different schedules. What should you do?
Tip: Mix your asynchronous and real-time processes
It's unnecessary to push hard to get everyone on a call daily. Here's what we learned works best for hybrid teams:
What and How to Ask During a Daily Standup
Understanding how to run standups is essential so that progress speeds dramatically.
The effectiveness of team standup is achieved through various factors, such as time limit, meeting agenda, the proper questions asked, and the brevity and capacity of the answers.
These three cornerstone daily standup questions typically make up an effective Scrum meeting.
Here's what Dave Smith, author of 'Are your standups awesome?', writes about questioning your team members during a standup meeting:
When I run standup, I do not ask each person to report their status. Instead, I ask about each of our team goals for the current sprint (which can be features, bug fixes, whatever). Team members report on how those goals are progressing, rather than their own personal levels of “busyness”.
Depending on the state of each goal, different people will speak. Sometimes it’s the product owner, sometimes it’s a developer, and sometimes it’s a tester. This helps keeps us focused on the things that matter most.
Tip: Ask questions ahead of meeting time in a chat
Sometimes developers come unprepared or talk about random stuff, making a meeting longer. Ideally, you want a quick, straight-to-point meeting to keep a team on track.
To do so, you can use some tool to ask team members the questions before the meeting and then share answers with attendees. It serves two reasons:
Keep it Short and Never Skip a Meeting
A meeting facilitator should keep the meeting within a 15-minute time box, or 20 minutes when done via a video conference leaving a couple of minutes for an ice-breaker (see the tip below).
Daily meetings are not meant to be long, rambling get-togethers but rather a quick, effective way to gather the team and ensure everyone’s on the same page.
To reduce complexity, standups are held same time every working day, preferably in the morning. It will provoke people to “tune-up their minds,” remember the previous day’s tasks and prepare a plan for the current day.
Daily standup meetings are never canceled, even if some people can't make it.
Tip: Be strict about schedule and duration
You may face a situation where someone can't make it on a call or running late. Don't be a nice guy; start the meeting on schedule and wrap up in 15-20 minutes.
It will create a habit for anyone to come on time and show the team you care about their time. The ones who missed a standup could read the team's answers if you gathered them before the meeting.
Also, you might want a more personal connection before getting to work for a video meeting. We prepared an extensive list of ice-breaker questions just for that purpose.
6 Tips to Run an Effective Standup Meeting
We've observed various Agile events in hundreds of teams and practiced some events ourselves. Although each team is different, we saw successful patterns.
Here are the top six tips on making the most out of standup meetings in a distributed team.
1. Stick to the Three Questions
To help keep everyone on track, the best way to keep your stand-up meeting format focused is to stick to three main topics.
This framework helps to keep the meeting focused on individual tasks and relate them to the overall Sprint Goal. Anything that needs further attention can be dealt with between relevant parties after the meeting.
2. Keep it Short and Sharp
Stand-up meetings are inherently short as people generally don’t like standing for hours [spending hours in Zoom]. Your goal is to keep the team aligned, so avoid ramblings and stop team members who do so in a polite way.
3. Bring Some Energy
Ideally, a daily meeting brings energy to its participants. Use the beginning and end of the meeting to motivate the team.
It can be a famous music track while a team’s gathering or breathing/physical activity before the start. It will help to run a meeting on a lighter note.
If the team works remotely, a trending gif or a funny meme shared in a channel is also a great way to add emotions to the text.
4. Have a Clear Agenda
The most productive meetings have a clear agenda, and daily standups are no exceptions. Make sure your dailies have a plan and don't go off-topic (unless there’s a good reason).
Here's the example:
a. Gathering. You can turn on the music, share the latest news, or share a motivational product metric (or quote).
b. Main body. Everyone begins to answer the three questions in turn. You can come up with an unusual order of priority and use some practices to determine the order of speaking:
c. Final. You can end happily by telling a joke or sharing some funny stuff. Well, or wish your colleagues an excellent working day.
5. Same Time, Same Place
Your daily stand-up event must happen on the same schedule, so your team can plan around it.
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Also, it's essential to choose a time when everyone involved is generally available. Many Agile teams opt for daily stand-up meetings first thing in the morning, but if you have remote employees in different time zones, you may have to schedule it later.
Alternatively, you can automate this process using a daily standup meeting tool. It will solve the timezone problem and aggregate replies by sending them to a manager and the team.
6. Make it easy to connect
If your team is spread out and connecting remotely for the daily stand-up meeting, ensure the team has access to an easy-to-use video conferencing solution that works across multiple devices.
If using a daily standup tool, ensure everyone is informed about the necessity of providing their answers.
Tools to Run Effective Standup Meetings
When you have remote folks on a team, you can't get together in front of the Agile board in the office. So, the right toolkit is a must to keep everyone aligned.
The need for team members to stay connected, maintain transparency, and foster collaboration is both a necessity and a challenge. In today's environment, managers combine in-person and asynchronous communication to achieve that goal.
According to our experience, we see a need for several groups of software tools. You may or may not use some of the tools below, but let us list the most useful ones that can make your daily meetings the most efficient.
1. Video Conferencing Software
There are various conferencing solutions to choose from. At last, they are intuitive, easy-to-use, and reliable video conferencing platforms. Such tools allow us to keep virtual eye contact, share the screen, demonstrate presentations, and discuss issues in a working chat.
Zoom is the most popular video conferencing software that helps us to gather together wherever we go. Ultimately everyone knows and has tried it in action at least once. Zoom is a great daily standup tool that amplifies the efficiency of remote teams through face-to-face meetings.
Zoom pros:
As statistics show, today, most Agile teams go for Slack, a proprietary business communication platform, and settle down there as a workspace to interact. That makes sense as no third parties need one platform for internal communication. Slack as a daily standup tool performs excellent – all in one app (calls, chats, plans, and standups).
Slack pros:
Another notorious platform for remote teams with a built-in program for video conferencing software is MS Teams. MS Teams as a standup tool is an excellent alternative to Slack with its interface and user-friendly management.
Microsoft Teams pros:
2. Digital Task Boards
Like the physical world, utilizing a digital task board during your remote daily stand-up helps team members connect with their work deeper and examine each task, its requirements, and their commitments. There are a lot of high-quality solutions on the market to use as an alternative to physical boards.
Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style list-making application and one of the perfect standup meeting tools. Trello is widely used in many Scrum ceremonies such as daily standup, backlog refinement, planning poker, kanban standup, etc.
Trello pros:
Jira is an excellent alternative to Trello for bug tracking and Agile project management. Implementing these task trackers in scum processes has become commonplace as essential standup tools.
Jira pros:
3. Standup Automation Software (Bots)
And last but not least group of tools is standup bots. The bot is your digital Scrum Master that integrates with a team's collaboration tool (Slack and MS Teams). It can automate most of the Project Management processes, such as daily standup meetings, retrospectives, backlog grooming, planning poker, sprint planning, and more.
This tool becomes the most efficient when the team embraces such a way of communication. If everyone on the team treats the bot like an essential part of their processes, it starts working on autopilot with fewer managers' time.
We'll cover the most popular solutions and their features in the chapter below.
Standup Bots' Features, Benefits, and Options
This part is for you if you haven't heard about the bots or still have concerns about such a way of managing your team.
Bots can add value to how you manage your team – proven by thousands of teams and dozens of solutions on the market. Each of them varies greatly, but the overall features are similar. See them below.
Standup Bots' Features
Scheduled reports – running multiple reports on a schedule or asynchronously with a standup meeting bot is possible. You pick a schedule to run daily meetings, and it just works according to that.
Timezones independence – standup reports are triggered by chosen time zone or each member’s local time. The bot will reach out to selected people in Slack or MS Teams at the scheduled time and ask them pre-defined questions.
Information delivery – the bot collects team answers and delivers aggregated reports via Slack, direct message, or email. Team answers can be posted as separate messages or arrive in a thread visible to any interested party.
Voice/Video attachments – team members can attach voice or video messages to their standup reports which will appear in the aggregated report in Slack or MS Teams.
Templates, Agile Charts, Integrations, and more – pre-defined templates are there for various scenarios; alternatively, it's possible to set up custom questions. The bot can build burndown charts, project flow diagrams, and more. Reports can also have data from Google Analytics, Salesforce, Stripe, and Trello to clarify a team's progress.
This is the dashboard of report templates in Standuply. Interested in trying it? Add Standuply to Slack/MS Teams.
Standup Bot's Benefits
No time zones pain – it doesn’t matter where your team members work; the bot collects answers asynchronously.
Shorter meetings – online asynchronous standup meeting requires even less time than a typical offline daily standup meeting (usually several minutes for every person).
Automation – once a report is scheduled, it works on autopilot without needing additional time to manage that process.
Integrations – standup meeting tools integrate with various apps to provide in-depth information on the team's progress inside a team's collaboration tool.
Transparency provides maximum clarity for all the distributed employees and stakeholders with less time involved.
Great customer support – most solutions for remote daily standups offer quick chat /email /video conference responses in case you need help.
Ease of use – it takes less than 5 minutes from creating an account to the first report to be configured and scheduled.
Standup Bots Solutions
We prepared an extensive article covering the top 6 standup bots in 2022 with an infographic (see below). Now you're equipped with everything to choose the right tools and processes to follow.
Thank you, and have more great meetings with your team.