Who let the chairs out? Standups are shorter when you stand up.

Scrum standups are not status meetings.  They exist to make sure people are working on the top priorities and call out blockers and impediments.  We want it to be brief and on point.  Problem-solving or design work gets pinned to be handled after the actual standup.

We had a 12 person team on one of my first Agile projects.  Our standups became one-hour sessions where people gave status and everyone's items ended up as another discussion.  One day we pulled all the chairs out of the conference room before anyone showed up. They all arrived to see the pile of chairs and an empty conference room. It was a bit heavy-handed but it worked.  It helped us re-focus on the purpose of the standup.

Our standup changed to 30 minutes of Scrum followed by a 2nd problem-solving session.  Everyone who stayed for problem-solving sat down and those that weren't problem-solving left the meeting room.

Accommodations

Some people may need accommodations because of handicaps.  Take those into account while trying to retain the spirit and idea that the daily standup isn't a problem-solving session. 

There was one person on the project who was upset with standing at standups.  They had been injured in a car accident.  It wasn't obvious and they hadn't ever mentioned it.  

We should have probably asked for people to tell communicate about their limits privately and then adjusted.  


Created 2022 01

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