​​BALLS to 'Normal' Standups

How effective are your standups? How long are they? Are they adding value? If your format is answering “what I did yesterday”, “what I’m doing today”, and listing blockers then this is aimed at you.

As ever, this isn’t personal opinion… it’s the output of an organisation having spent 15 years of researching and refining standups.

The industry standard for standups is really ineffective and often just used by micro managers to get status updates and chase people.

“What did I do yesterday”
Do the other developers care, or is this just being used to checkup on your progress? Most people naturally want to sound like they have completed as much as possible, and so tell you everything they did regardless of how useful this information is…I’m sure your sandwich was very tasty Steven. This can be scrapped to focus on “Lessons Learned” instead. This is anything I learned worthy of informing the team. It’s much more enagaing as everyone should care about this.

“What I am doing today”
This makes people focus on the tasks they intended to complete. Wording this as “Aims” helps peoples to focus on a concise message of what they wish to achieve

Blockers
This is very useful, but you don’t need to solve them in the standup if they take more than a few seconds. Just try to ensure whoever is blocked knows who to speak or an appropriate next step to get on their way again

If it’s not a Blocker, Aim or Lesson Learned then Shut up!

So what happens if someone is talking about something outside of these points? Use the word BALLS to interrupt. Many conversations between a subset of people will occur, but they can easily be completed afterwards with only those people necessary!

Finally, try focusing on value. Ideally going from story to story and from right to left on your Kanban board rather than from person to person. This helps keep focus on the value the team is develivering and prevents discussion drifting to things which are irrelevant

Hope this helps you as much as it has helped the organisations who have adopted it