Stand Up Meetings Start The Day

Context: You want to have daily meetings.

Therefore: StandUpMeetings start the day.

You work from 9 to 5.

You start the meeting at 9:00 and you finish it by 9:15. What's the problem?

However: What if you work 10 to 6, or 11 to 7? Then you start the meeting at 10, or acknowledge that the few that don't start work by 9 won't be able to attend these meetings.

Counter Example: What if you work, say, from 5am to 3pm? In this case, acknowledge that the stand-up meeting won't start your day. But you can still show up for it.

Perhaps this solution is overly specific. The goal is to have daily meetings. To do this one needs to find an acceptable time and place that is acceptable (not necessarily ideal) to all. Find out what fits the work style of your particularly team and adapt. If early morning is working for your team, great! For others, it may be mid-morning, lunch time, mid afternoon, end of the day, or varying times. Adapt and adjust.

What's the problem?

Some engineers, sadly, have families. Until we can enforce a policy of eunuch-only teams, engineers often have distant houses instead of local flops, daily routes to schools, and other non-productive habits.

Huh? How does having a family (or living a significant distance from work) preclude people from showing up to work by 9:00 a.m.? Everyone where I work shows up by 9:00, and we have families, commute significant distances, etc.

And then there's Belgium. -- StijnSanders

We're in a team of five or six and we work in one open area. I'm thinking on scheduling a daily stand-up meeting very strictly as, "Whenever the last one rolls in," which usually happens 8:45 to 9:15. Everyone sees that last one roll in and so we move to our stand-up meeting area, which is the middle of the open work area. Does this solve the StandUpMeetingsStartTheDay problem?

"Whenever the last one rolls in" presents a few problems. If people need to schedule other meetings in the morning, knowing that the standup meeting will be over by 9:15 lets them commit to being somewhere else at 9:30. You lose that by not having a set start time. Also, by the time the last person rolls in the first arrivals may have been at their desks working for a while. It's hard to decide whether or not to start something new if you don't know when you're going to be interrupted for a meeting.

I've worked in places that were very rigid about everyone showing up for a 9am meeting. It meant that the meeting was always done by 9:15. In contrast, when I've worked in offices where the morning meeting started at 9:30-ish, end times varied a lot more and my least productive time of day was between 9:30 and 9:30-ish.

If a team needs to be gotten together on a daily basis, doing it first thing in the morning is the lesser evil. If you do it at the end of the day, you're creating a minimum departure time which is frustrating on days when one is really done with one's work and ready to go. Doing it in the middle of the day throws a monkey wrench into scheduling other meetings with people outside the team.

If you're done with your work early, shouldn't you be starting on the next task? If not, what about people who know they can get their work done for the day even if they come in at noon - or who know they can't get started until they get answers from the West Coast office, which doesn't open until noon Eastern time?

If you want a meeting to last X minutes, start it X minutes before lunch.

This also solves the problem of breaking people's concentration... it was going to be broken by lunch anyway.

See StandUpMeeting, TyrannyOfTheMorningPeople