Can I skip this meeting (or standup)? 

👆🏻 This is the most hated question for the majority of project managers especially if you are running a startup or managing a scrum team. 

But if you don’t have daily standups then as a manager how you will track project progress or sprint?

You see daily standups now bad but it got a bad reputation due to how it’s run these days. And, it’s easy to see why.

A daily stand-up is typically 15 minutes long. But are they? 

You need all the engineers to commit to the standup every day. To bolster commitment, it should take place at the same time every day and last just 15 minutes which is an issue if your engineers are in a different timezone😵

What’s morning for you could be the night for someone else😴

Then there are calendar clashes, internal meetings with the scrum team, or an offshore team working on a project. What if your engineer is on an important call with some senior engineer, or stuck in fixing a bug that took longer than expected?

After all this, the engineer needs some time to recoup from these meetings, and then focus on the assigned tasks🥱

The University of California Irvine revealed that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task at hand.

This means the time a team member needs to recoup from the daily stand-up is longer than the daily stand-up meeting itself🤯

That’s an irreversible 25 minutes taken away from every single one of your team members every day. So if you have 10 team members, that’s 1250 hours gone every week after 1 meeting (or standup). Is this worth it?

So, what should you do instead?

1. Automate async status updates
   
   You can ask your engineers to spend 30 seconds writing a few bullet points on what they worked on yesterday, what they plan to work on today, and any blockers they have. They can answer on their own time when it makes sense for them which doesn’t interrupt their workflow. For this, you can use a PM tool, Sheets or Slack Geekbot.
   
   
2. Have a 1 weekly staff meeting, and a Head of Departments meeting
   
   Ask managers or department heads to collect all the updates from engineers, and then have a weekly alignment call to discuss project progress or next steps. 
   
   Managers can have 1-1 calls with engineers as per their availability or convenience for regular sync up, blockers or what can be done better. 
   
   This process has worked really well for us at Glorify and ZapBG. It boosted the team’s growth, and confidence, and saved hours 😊

Daily stand-up meetings are an antiquated relic. It’s time to sunset them with new processes, and automation.

If you feel the same way about daily stand-ups, let me know down below 👇🏻