So why do teams do dailies? Among the common responses there are usually two
- transparency: we want to know what everybody is working on
- blocker resolution: we want to have a place in time where people can talk about blockers and how to resolve them
And since more and more teams work distributed, a third one pops up:
- team building: we want people to regularly talk to each other.
I want to share why i think all of these reasons make no sense (anymore).
Team building
I believe using a daily is one the most terrible choices for creating personal communication within a team. Because everybody just tells you "yesterday i worked on this and that and today i'm working and that and this". They are not talking about their cats and dogs and what music they like or whatever is personally important for them.
People in dailies are just fulfilling a duty to report on their progress. It's clearly not the environment to get touchy or personal ...
So if you want to foster team communication, try something like random coffees, virtual whine tastings or whatever people in your team are into.
Transparency
Managers want to know what their reports are doing every day and how they are progressing so it's great to get a report every day, right?
Well, turns out everybody is using some project management tool with some kind of virtual SCRUM or Kanban board. So you could just look at that board to get a glimpse of how everybody is progressing - without pulling everybody out of their focus and into some meeting.
Sure, the SCRUM board might not be up to date. People tend to forget to update the tasks they are working on. But this is no justification to patch this behaviour with another meeting. It's at best a justification to train people to use the tools right.
If your adding a daily standup on top of a virtual SCRUM board, you are either just repeating information already available to everybody. Or you are working around a lack of hygiene when it comes to tool usage. Either way, you are not adding value to the process.
Blocker resolution
This is one of the worst reasons to do dailies i believe. Because do you really want people to wait with resolving their blockers until the next day when another daily is scheduled? Everybody is on Slack or Email anyways. Why not just ping the people or teams you need? If you're blocked, you want to resolve the problem immediately and continue working, no?
So why did people introduce dailies in the first place?
You have to think back some years to get to this point. Like ... probably 13-15 years ago. People started doing agile development and introduced methods like SCRUM. Back then, people didn't work remote (mostly). And it was common to not use a digital SCRUM board (heck it was even frowned upon).
The daily chore of a SCRUM standup was about gathering around a physical whiteboard (in person!) and move physical post-it notes around. Because "SCRUM board" meant a whiteboard with some drawn columns and post-it notes.
And these notes where only moved in the standup - because this meeting was the single source of truth about team progress, solved tasks and blockers.
Nowadays with JIRA, Asana etc. people just gather in a video call to parrot information from their tool of choice. Information that has already been integrated into the tool in advance and can already be known to everybode. What a waste of time and focus ...
Moving forward
So what do to instead? Here are my suggestions:
- Train people do dilligently use your project mangement tool or SCRUM board. If someone wants an update or have transparency on team progress, he should always be able to just look into the tool of choice. Instead of having to wait for the next day and everybody to gather in a meeting.
This addresses (and improves) the transparency aspect because everybody has it every time. - Transparent communication: put requests, blockers, information into Slack. Stop using direct messages for anything non-personal. Create channels per topic or team and have everybody put discussions there in public - even if they @mention just a single person. Because it allows everybody to know what's going on and maybe chime in if he or she can contribute to a problem or discussion.
This addresses transparency and blocker resolution. It also improves both because it documents discussions and decisions in a written medium. Because a standup is just verbal and ephemeral communication which is lost immediately (ask someone what was discussed in yesterdays standup - i bet most will blank on this one). - If you're remote or distributed, look into virtual coffees and the like to help with team building.