The Stand-Up Meeting

A stand-up meeting is a brief team meeting for communicating project status and raising issues with minimum disruption. Experiments with the Scrum method of agile software development were my first exposure to these meetings, and they've been a part of my own management process ever since.

These fifteen-minute quick round robins rapidly surface issues and keep the team on track. They provide daily accountability and improved coordination without overburdening the team leader. They help a team react quickly to changes, and stay proactive in a dynamic environment.

In these meetings, these are the only three questions asked: What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? What's in your way? The team leader records the answers (sometimes on a Visual Project Plan) and the team resolves the issues off-line. Team members stand up to emphasize that this is supposed to be a quick update, not an exhaustive narrative.

I just found an article that describes the mechanics of a stand-up meeting: It's Not Just Standing Up. It describes the attributes of a well-functioning stand-up meeting, and identifies some remedies for common problems such as lateness, over-running the time or digressing into problem-solving. I especially liked the author's description of the effective stand-up meeting's energizing effect on team productivity, and the various ways that a team leader can encourage the team to take more ownership for the meeting, which makes them run more smoothly.