Stand-up meeting
A short progress-sharing meeting held standing up in 15 minutes or less, used in agile development.
A stand-up meeting (daily stand-up, morning meeting) is a progress-sharing meeting format that team members hold briefly while standing. It was systematized in the agile development methods of the 1990s, especially as the “Daily Scrum” of the Scrum framework, and it is also used in fields outside software development.
The 15-minute rule and the 3 questions
The basic rule of a stand-up meeting is to “finish within 15 minutes.” A typical format has participants answer the following 3 questions while standing (physically standing is meant to keep remarks from running long).
Work completed since the last stand-up
Tasks planned for today
Obstacles or issues holding up progress
Changes with remote work
With remote work, the physical meaning of “standing” fades, but the essence of sharing information in a short time stays the same. Variations suited to each team’s situation have emerged, such as a video call format on Zoom or Teams and an asynchronous text format on Slack (async standup). In the asynchronous format, each member posts answers to the 3 questions at the start of the workday and discusses in threads as needed.
What matters is that a stand-up is not “a place for reporting” but “a place for syncing.” Topics that need detailed discussion go into the “parking lot,” and only the people involved discuss them separately after the stand-up. Fixing the agenda keeps the preparation cost down each time.
Running long is a sign it is becoming an empty formality
When a stand-up that used to finish in 15 minutes starts taking 30, it is a sign that “a place for syncing” has begun turning into “a place for discussion.” There are two typical causes: starting to solve blockers on the spot, and the listener becoming only the manager so that it turns into a reporting session. The former is easy to fix by splitting things off with “details later, among those involved,” and the latter by running the meeting so that remarks are addressed to the whole team again. If the time keeps growing and is left alone, participants may learn that it is “a meeting it does not matter if I skip.”