You come across as a savvy leader. Thank you for sharing you experience, -Steve

There is a fascinating set of studies from research on decision making in meetings that suggests if you have people stand up rather than sit down, the meetings run about 35 percent shorter without any loss of decision quality.

I haven’t seen the studies, but that results seems reasonable. From my experience, the design and leadership of most meetings are pathetic so forcing people to stand up probably would make them shorter and wouldn’t change the quality of decisions.

I don’t, however, believe for one second that the same effect would be true for a well led meeting. Standing up wouldn’t change the quality of the decisions and it wouldn’t make the duration of the meeting any shorter.

I believe the success being discussed is not a result of “standing up” at a standup/huddle but is a result of having a stable location to give the team continuity.

For years I have found daily meetings a sweet tool that increases communication. Long before I knew about Scrum, I had my road warrior project teams meet every morning at 7:30 at the customers site. Initially, I just wanted to see them sober and have time to react (don’t ask), but like others, I found great value. We didn’t stand up but we did have a dedicated war room. Later, as an Agile coach and Scrum Master, I enthusiastically employed standups – but eventually took to leaving it as a team decision.

Having led 27 Agile projects to date, I feel somewhat qualifed to share my observations albeit some of those projects were only a month long. Some were over a year long though! I have had teams stand up, sit, and present in several modes and environments. Those are:

Standing up doesn’t make the team more comfortable or increase their adherence to the norms.

Standing up doesn’t give me a place to keep my project artifacts – but it does make chairs not needed.

Standing up doesn’t curb peoples ability to rant, discuss or digress at a meeting. It more about how the meetings are conducted and as stated earlier – who is there.

If the product owner is there – teams can be restricted in their exchanges or more verbose – depending upon the individuals. The idea is to have the product owner observe only and not make ANY comments – hence the chicken and the pig concept previlent among agile circles. It works well but takes leadership to mentor team members on how to behave in this new meeting structure.

Agile teams are all about embracing change but the human element requires some level of stability and comfort. A daily team meeting provides that as well as a “home” for the team – even if it is in a corner.

So while I understand your belief that the standups increased communication I believe that it was having their own location that provided the sense of belonging so critical to team building.

Thoughts?

Your team’s ownership of your own space trumps any objections I have to standing up. I hadn’t considered that possibility. It’s now an option that’s available to me and others.

-Steve

I can only claim 9 months experience using stand up meetings on one project, but I would like to make some observations that differ from this article.

One of the non-obvious advantages of having a stand up versus a sit down meeting is that it frees the team from conference rooms and conference room schedules. We appropriated a corner off of a hallway that our team “owned.” We didn’t have to schedule access and we were able to leave items posted on the wall and items on a whiteboard full time. Without having to compete with others for the space, we could lock down our meeting time.

Concerning preparation for the meeting, my recommendation is don’t. If you are having daily meetings, it does not require that much effort to remember what you did yesterday or plan to do today. In trade for having team members agree to meet daily, it is the manager’s responsibility to ensure the effort required does not exceed 15 minutes (I usually targetted 10 minutes for an 11 man team and we met that about 50% of the time).

1 1/2 minutes of uninterrupted speaking time is actually quite a lot (as any members of Toastmasters might substantiate). Keeping reporting time to 1 minute a person for daily meetings is quite feasible, especially considering that there is not usually much need to answer the third Scrum question, “What is blocking me?”

In Scrum, there is a feedback mechanism for the daily status meetings – the monthly iteration retrospective. This is a wide open forum conducted as a sit down meeting covering all aspects of the previous month’s effort.

All in all, our team was quite happy with the stand up approach and became strongly motivated to keep the duration short. The hidden advantage of not requiring chairs and a table allowed us to use an otherwise dead area of the office and take total ownership of the (admittedly quite small) space.