Stand-ups are used by most creative and digital agencies. Teams have daily meetings where they align around their progress, challenges and discuss what’s coming next.
At least 15 minutes a day is spent on those calls. The whole team attends. Listening is the primary activity for attendees. It shouldn’t be controversial to state that the time should be used wisely.
But what does wisely mean? Well for me it means that it’s a good use of time for all who attend. From the most experienced to the least experienced team member. No matter what the role. Everyone should walk away believing they benefited from the call.
The focus of these stand-ups however is all too often a turn taking exercise where an individual’s status is shared. They read out information that is stored in accessible digital tools that the team can access.
What if stand-ups were about planning instead of reporting?
Reporting has been done to death. We’ve solved all the reporting problems. You can have real-time reporting about almost anything that is stored online. It offers assignment, progress, status, estimation, cost, all the things you could want to know.
We don’t need to use stand-ups to share this information.
But if these stand-ups became about planning and unblocking and commitment, the conversations stop covering the existing status and start encouraging transparency and progress and working on priorities as a team.
No more asking ‘yesterday? today? blockers?’ more asking for commitment and ownership.
What are you going to achieve today?
What might stop that happening?
Who do you need to ensure success?
What needs to be deprioritised?
What would have helped you succeed yesterday?
I’ll write more on the practical aspects of this soon on Agency Tactics.