Back when daily standups were conceived they were a good solution to waterfall development problems. Instead of working on their specification in isolation, everyone would get in a room and any issues would be surfaced before they got out of hand.
Unfortunately, they don’t really work well in the world we now find ourselves in.
The assumption that everyone is in the same room doesn’t translate well into online experiences.
Somebody, somewhere, is going to have a technical glitch, or forget to mute, or have a dog turn over the laptop. Unless everyone has a dedicated home office, it’s just not going to be possible to bring the same level of concentration to the meeting.
Once a day isn’t enough.
From the developer side, standups only really worked when we could have all the little conversations to clear blockages outside the standup. We don’t get those hallway conversations anymore, so the standup takes way longer than it should. You can try to keep that out of the meeting, but I’ve never seen it successfully done. Developers just want to help too much.
From the business side, the same lack of little conversations means that progress isn’t being made until tomorrow, and that utterly kills productivity. You can try to fix it by having more frequent group checkins, or a chat channel that should be monitored, but then you just wind up killing productivity because people are always getting interrupted when they need to focus.
There is a better way.
Instead of standups, what’s needed is continuous collaboration. Status isn’t something that exists at a point in time, it’s something that everyone should be able to see whenever they want. Questions and issues need to be reflected in that status, and should cause the appropriate people to be notified, instead of taking the entire team’s time.
Continuous actionable status is one of the things we’re trying to bring to life with Uclusion, and we hope you give it a try.
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