Are team standups still relevant in the world of async communication? Or in a closely working team?
First time I came into contact with the concept of standup meetings was in the context of Scrum. I am not sure, but it looks like Scrum is where this kind of meetings came from. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a software development team that doesn’t have daily standups, even in those where there are no other traces of Scrum or Agile. It has become some kind of de-facto standard of team effectiveness and communication best-practice.
Misunderstood purpose
Many standup meetings I have been part of were repetitive and to some extent wasteful. Wasteful because what is the point of saying the same thing every day? And still, if the usefulness of these meetings is challenged, the most common reply is that it is useful still for the team to have a daily interval when they are all in the same meeting (especially in these remote times).
Which makes me think that the original purpose of standups is misunderstood. The purpose of standups is to create awareness about the work being done in the team and make it easier to remove blockers:
- What did I do yesterday?
- What will I do today?
- Is there anything blocking me in my work?
Their purpose is not about socializing or keeping in contact with your team colleagues. If it would be then why keep talking about the answers to the same 3 questions? Chit-chat would be more appropriate or some kind of free discussion.
Still relevant?
The more I think about the original purpose of the standup meeting, the more it looks like it gives an opportunity for micro-management. Many standups become some kind of status reports for the ears of managers or whatever person holds the metaphorical whip.
In the age of Slack and highly effective teams, I believe the standup doesn’t make much sense. In a team where people work closely together to reach the team’s goals, they will know what each of them is working on and if they have any blockers. How? By either working together on the same thing (pair or mob programming) or by talking through the wide number of communication channels available to teams nowadays (or some combination of those).
It might make sense when members of a team don’t work closely together and it’s good to have this daily refresher. In this case, I would argue that they might not actually form a team, but rather just a group of people intersecting in their work. And this is actually my point: team members shouldn’t need a team standup.
Later edit (Wed, 28 Dec 08:12): As someone pointed out in a comment to my post on LinkedIn, there is no “team standup” in Scrum, it is called the “daily scrum” and from 2020 it no longer specifies the 3 questions. There is a “standup meeting” in XP (Extreme Programming) which prescribes the 3 questions as the format of the meeting and requires everyone to be standing up during the meeting.