Three habits of an effective standup

Most teams have adopted a daily meeting, be it a standup or daily start, to sync their work. In these meetings people share what they have been doing, are going to do, what went well, what went wrong and they ask for help if they need it. A lot of meetings are becoming a drag where people only tell about their schedule yesterday and today. They inform about big pieces of work they are still working on, or about all the small details that they spend hours on.

What can we do to make these meetings more effective? How can they deliver value to our work?

One: talk about work, not persons

If you have an overview of the work that is in progress and the work that needs to be done, talk about when work in progress is done or what we need to do to get it done. We don't really care at this point in time when our peers have meetings with the dentist, we care about the work we committed to.

Two: work from right top to left bottom

If you have a Kanban system in place with a board and swim lanes and such, start on the top right lane of work that is not done (typically the last lane is the done-lane, so start in the lane before last). Decide with the team how the top item can be completed today, then work your way down that lane. If the lane is done, move a lane over to the left, rinse and repeat. With this system you focus on getting work done, to really deliver the work. Only the stuff that is done counts, the rest cannot be used by our customers and is therefore not done.

Three: limit work in progress

Set a limit on the maximum number of items per swim lane. A rule of thumb is here to put a WIP-limit in of half the team size. A team of six persons would have a WIP-limit of three per lane. When you limit the work that is being worked on, people need to focus on delivering current work. It is possible that not everybody is "working"; perhaps someone is idle. That is not a problem. As long as the work is done what the team committed to, being idle is fine. We are being effective and that is not efficient per se.

These methods focus on getting work done, to live up to the commitment we give our customers and stakeholders when we start a sprint. Being effective is focusing on the outcome of our work. The daily standup is an event we can use to inspect the results of that focus and adapt where needed.