What is the Standup all about?

Tom Breur

24 May 2015

As part of the Scrum routine, teams have daily standups. Quick, efficient, and to the point, following a specific outline. What did I finish yesterday, what will I commit to today, and what are my impediments (click here for an earlier blogpost on impediments)? They are called “stand-ups” for a reason. The justification for doing these meetings on your feet rather than on a chair is to avoid people getting comfortable, to help keep these meetings short. A tiny bit of time saved every day amounts to considerable time over the lifetime of a project.

Of course the only reason to be standing up is to save time, to help the meeting stay focused and short. If you can accomplish the same goal while being seated – great! An additional benefit of standing might sometimes be that a group forming a semi-circle around their Kanban board allows direct eye-to-eye contact for all participants.

More accurately, these “Kanban boards” are mostly task- or story-boards. My friend Michael Mahlberg wrote a great post about these, recently. We seem to have “loosened” these terms, as if they are the same (they are not!). But like a Kanban board, these story boards are meant as information radiators. Better communication, more effective feedback, cues from non-verbal behavior, etc. all serve to maximize benefits from face-to-face interaction.

Stand-ups can get “boring”, though, especially if they last longer than they need to. They are emphatically not a status meeting. The key to keeping your contribution short is to focus on your (“net”) output – which implies referring to the business value of your accomplished tasks. Especially for more “technical” jobs it can be challenging to phrase these in “business” terms, yet there exactly lies the key to success. Unless you can express this business value, why are you doing this in the first place??