A client who's trying to move to
agile is having trouble with the idea of literally standing at standup meetings. "I get the whole part of keeping the meeting short, but why do we have to stand up? My legs get tired."
I explained that when people don't stand, they are more likely to initiate and jump into sidebar conversations, aka rat-holes. "We don't do that here."
Um, yes, they did. And, we had the video to prove it. We were trying to do a feature-in-a-day, something I often do with clients, to see where the bottlenecks are, and how little they can actually do and still deliver valuable results. We were doing one-hour timeboxes with standups in between to see what was actually going on. We gained a number of valuable insights in our standups:
- The one-hour timebox was too short. We should have done two-hour timeboxes. But we didn't because not everyone could free their schedules to participate every two hours, so we learned something about their projects and their daily organization.
- When everyone stood up, the standups were no more than 5 minutes. When even one person sat down, we had tangents and rat-hole discussions.
- They discovered that creating a project on their configuration management system cost them more than 30 minutes. Very interesting.
- They learned that they had people who were even more specialized than they originally thought.
- Almost everyone was quite willing to learn what other people do and how to help them.
If you are considering moving to
agile, try a feature-in-a-day. And, as you do that, do practice standup meetings and standing up for them.
