The Definitive Guide for the Perfect Daily Standup [with 9 actionable tips]

• What is the number one most important thing to impact your Daily Standup?
  
• What tools do you need to use right now to optimize your Daily Standup?
  
• Why should you even have a Daily Standup?
  

Daily Standup?

Daily Standup - def. - a daily meeting or huddle to collaborate on progress through individual status reports

Simply, this is the predetermined time daily, where the business or team will get together to discuss what they have been working, what they will work on and anything standing in their way. While this seems simple, there is actually quite a bit of things that can go wrong and lead to a very inefficient Daily Standup.

Aside from staples in the SCRUM and Agile methodologies, many businesses or teams will use a Daily Standup to offer transparency into work towards goals and obstacles that may be encountered. Quite frankly almost every team or business will benefit from a Standup.

What Does A Bad Standup Look Like?

• Everyone is late for the meeting
  
• Rarely is anyone prepared
• “I uh, umm” are the first words out of multiple individuals mouths
  
• No transparency on towards progress
• Lifeless read-out of things done
• The thought that you can’t wait for someone to stop their 5 minute monologue about the architecture of a reverse word function

Tip #1: The list can go on, but that list sets up the basic idea on just of how you will be able to pick out a bad standup. 

If you have you identified with one or more of the items on the list, you need to read on. Let’s get fixing!

What do We Talk About?

A Standup will focus on three main topics:

• What did I do(yesterday)?
  
• What am I doing(today)?
• What is blocking my progress?

The above questions should relate and speak to the goals set by the team, business and/or stakeholders. This means no ‘story time’, nor should these be answered in a contextless checklist or bullet points speech. 

Tip #2: By answering the above questions, while speaking to the goals the individual will offer depth and insight to an enriched meeting audience.

When Should You Have Your Standup?

Generally, the Standup should be somewhere near the beginning part of the day. However, I would caution against you making it the very first thing most of the team members do in the day. It’s a careful balance here, as you want to use the meeting to set the tone, cadence and work for the day. However, you also do not want people to dread the Standup just because it is that first thing they do when they get into work(remote or in office).

Tip #3: Once set, it is imperative this meeting happens the same time every day.

Where Should You Have Your Standup?

Almost as important as the time it happens(reminder: same time every day), is the location at which the meeting occurs. For the most part, you will want to locate the meeting near most of the members. This may even be a non issue for some small teams or businesses who have very few common areas to decide between. Likewise, if there is anyone(or a chance that anyone) who works remotely, you will want to have an audio/video chat system set up, with the same location each time as well(i.e. same hangout link, same teleconf number).

Tip #4: Once set, it is imperative this meeting happens in the same place everyday, both in person and on the web.

You Should be Standing Up

An important piece of the Standup is each individuals buy-in. To start off, the easiest tip is to take the name ‘standup’ literally and have every one stand up. This forces them to stop what they are doing and focus on the meeting. However, as I will cover later, this shouldn’t be a last minute ‘oh yeah’ moment, in the number one most important thing in your standup.

Tip #5: Standing up is practically a physiological hack that will help focus the attendees and speed up the meeting

Let’s Make Some Rituals

Additionally, you may want to adopt further rituals. One that I like is using a timer to restrict an individual’s report to no longer than a minute. Why one minute? One minute should be enough time to succinctly report ‘What I did’, ‘What I am doing’ and ‘What is impeding my progress’. However, if a roadblock or impediment is fostering cross team thought and collaboration, you may let it go for another minute or so. The key here is not to let the discussion devolve into a 10 minute technical debate. Likewise, this also can be solved with the number one most important thing in your standup.

Another ritual that may help break some of the monotony of a poor standup meeting, may be to pick a different way to kick off the meeting. Switching up the first individual Standup or even the order the Standups are reported. My personal favorite is to use an object, such as a foam ball, to be passed around in a random order. This tends to keep each individual on their toes and focused to the meeting.

Tip #6: Random ordering and time boxing the individual reports are some examples of important rituals or ways to keep the meeting efficient.

Alright, Lets Get to the Tools

I should preface this section with the advice that you do not drive your with meetings tools, but rather let tools supplement and optimize your meetings. With that said, here are some tools that can definitely help your Standups:

1. Slack - Slack has been blowing up for the last few years with over 500 thousand daily users, and there’s a great reason. It is a great communication tool to hold asynchronous communication. One of it’s greatest features is integrations. Integrations allow you to add different commands, or handle the output of other web tools and applications, such as Github, Stripe or JIRA. Slack is free, but has paid versions for more features.
   
2. HipChat - An alternative to Slack, a little more mature, but seemingly a little less feature rich and less integrations, but it is cheaper for the paid version.
3. Trello - Great kanban(ish) board task manager. This tool is great to hold tasks or goals, but can become unwieldy when it is it’s boards are not properly managed and maintained. However going through past tasks and items can be daunting.

I picked these tools as they may help you in your Standup communication, such as when an individual logs or updates their standup report or follow their tasks. It is important peer into both the current day, and through the past to have a view into goal progress, velocity(speed at which work is being completed) and simply to see a person’s or goal’s point-in-time work.

Tip #7: Tools are to be used as supplementation to the process, but with the right tools, and used correctly can greatly increase the meeting’s efficiency.

Now, the Number One Most Important Thing to Impact your Daily Standup

This whole section is SO IMPORTANT it is worth the final two tips.

I have found the most important part of daily standup is the self introspection done by the individuals. This is what keeps the team accountable for their own piece of the pie. This is what creates the personal buy-in to the Daily Standup and the goals the team has collectively agreed to finish. This is what gives the individual transparency into their own progress.

Do I have you attention regarding its importance now? I assume you’re asking well how does this make an impact? It’s actually rather simple, the individual team members need to write out their Standup either on paper or preferably in some digital, shareable, trackable medium. When the individual writes their Standup down, it offers the following benefits:

• They are prepared, ready and awaiting the Daily Standup
  
• Thus, no one is ever late for the meeting
• No more rambling and stumbling through trying to remember what they did and should talk about
• Complete transparency into their self progress and team progress towards goals
• A specific and meaningful readout of their Standup
• Leaves very little chance for tangents and lengthy updates

Now that you have 9 actionable tips at your fingertips. Go fix, optimize and streamline your Daily Standups now!