“Truly mature teams get to a point where they resolve issues as they encounter them. ”

so very true. perhaps the “no issues” anti-pattern is more applicable to an immature team, then.

@All,

The feedback on this has been tremendous – especially the counter-arguments and people pointing out the issues in what I’ve stated! There’s obviously some points that I completely missed in my original post, and I really do appreciate everyone’s input on this.

If you don’t hear many issues during stand-up, and you observe the team during the day, and they still are not resolving issues, then you may have a point. But if you observe a team resolving their issues during the course of the day, then where is the problem? Because they didn’t turn the stand-up into a group therapy session? Software development isn’t social work. Well, some teams may seem like social work, but the healthy teams don’t need as much structure as immature teams.

And besides, do you really want to take action on the software schedule when a guy picks his car up from the garage? You aren’t going to get anything done besides adjusting the schedule 8 times a day.

What I did yesterday
What I am doing today
Anything that is stopping me moving forwards

This way, even if you don’t answer the last question with anything but “no issues” … other team members or the project managers should see patterns arising in you repeating the first two answers.

Also, I have no problem with stand ups where people say “Yeah I can’t get X working, seems to be some bug in Y component” … this gives an opportunity for other team members to speak up if they can easily help. Don’t waste stand up time discussing in detail, but agree to take it offline right after the meeting.

training is the answer, yes. there are a lot of different approaches to this, as you and @jbogard pointed out. i think i could have stated this more clearly in the original post. good call from both of you.

@quincy,

great insight. monitoring/measurement is an absolute necessity for improvement. you can’t improve what you aren’t measuring.

If the problem is that the individual doesn’t recognize issues, how will they be able to identify a small, seemingly insignificant one? Rather, as a training paradigm, does it not make better sense for leadership to instruct and the team to self-educate on what constitutes an issue? An in doing so, do not the larger and the recurring issues lend themselves more readily to identification and remediation?

sorry to hear that. i hope we can make the stand ups more valuable for your team, in the near future.

@michael.jones,
end-goal, i agree. we need to take care of the “big issues” first. but until the team is able to recognize the big AND small issues, and actually be able to quantify the difference, we need to capture everything. if you don’t know what a small issue is, how will you know what a big issue is?

@michael adkins,
excellent parrallel to the army! i can see how the same foundational issue you saw is present in what i was trying to address here.

After reading the Army manual, I finally worked up enough courage to let the leadership know about it and requested that the leadership follow the Army doctrine and start doing thing the Army way; not the traditional way that had been handed down incorrectly over the years. I won’t go into the Superior/Inferior schematics of the United States Military, but you get my point. It appears the same holds true for the daily standup.

Just my two cents.

~AD

Whereas the goal may be to drive out all extraneous time wasters, is an immediate shift to reporting all, a good implementation strategy? I would postulate that a staged approach would yield better immediate results.

I view this as more of an eduational issue, educating team members to recognize issues and thereby creating a cultural bias towards identifying, reporting and addressing issues.

Maybe so, I have not seen any benefit from the stand ups I have participated in for the past few months. The only benefit for the team that I have seen is the surfacing of problems, which forces the team to tackle such problems, other than that it seems to be a waste of time.

I believe better time-management is essential for increased individual (and, subsequently, team) productivity. The best way to understand how you’re spending your time is to document and measure what you’re doing with your time. That will allow you to make adjustments to make better use of your time. Sure, you will increase your “workload” while you’re gathering data, but the end-result should be less time wasted. Similar to how lifting heavy weights actually causes (minor) damage to the muscles before the muscles get stronger. To continue the weight-lifting analogy, you may need a “trainer” (i.e., someone you trust and whose opinion you value) to identify issues that need to be addressed (e.g., “inhale on the lift, exhale on the release”, “two hours a day for research seems a bit high”, etc).

So, even if all the issues aren’t worth bringing up before the team (as team/project issues), individuals can increase their productivity by documenting, measuring and removing as many of the “time-wasting” issues as possible.