Tips to keep your morning stand-ups productive

Being a fully Agile company is a challenge for agencies where team members work on many projects in a given week. Breadcrumb is aligned to the core beliefs of Agile and has integrated many of its methods into the daily routine of the whole team.

One of the most important things we’ve adopted is the morning stand-up – a time-boxed meeting held at the same time and place each day.

Below are some of my tips for a successful stand-up.

Lock-in a time

It’s important to keep this meeting set for the same time each day so everyone knows they need to be ready for it.

We choose 9:30 to 9:45 am as it gives the team time to plan for their day and takes into account Breadcrumb’s flexible work arrangements.

One of our rules is if you’re late stand-up will start without you. As it’s a short meeting and scheduled at the same time every day, there is very little excuse for not being prepared or around to join in when it starts.

Hold it somewhere comfortable

We hold our stand-ups by a large office window that is used as a Kanban board. The whole team joins the stand-up so this isn’t an issue in an open plan office. If your stand-up doesn’t include everyone, find a place that is suitable and not distracting to others.

Keep the stand-up to 15 minutes

In a stand-up you only need to answer three questions:
1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What will I do today?
3. Is there anything blocking me?

A team of any size can answer these three questions and have it provide very useful insights. There is nothing worse than stand-ups that go beyond 15 minutes.

As a team come up with a way to police the ‘over explaining’ and ‘problem solving’. If someone is talking about a particular task for more than a minute then it should be taken offline.