Or sometimes you just really don't care.
Agreed. Hearing about the minutiae about someone's task is tedious. To me the daily scrum is like getting home and asking your significant other "how was work today?". Boring question, boring answer.
I definitely prefer the asynchronous approach. That way if I don't care about what you're working on (or vice versa), we don't need to waste time standing in a room together.
If part of my work depends on theirs, or requires specific coordination, I'll use whatever mutually agreeable medium to exchange the information that is needed.
I've never really felt like I didn't know what people on the team were working on, despite not having a daily meeting or weekly status.
I don't get the blockers thing either. If I'm blocked, you're getting an email or IM immediately. I'm not going to wait until the weekly status email, or even the next day, to tell you. And I'm not going to bother the people who can't do anything about it.
But understand the hesitation. And if someone is blocked, agreed, it should result in a quick email or IM. Of course, if you spent all day yesterday trying to figure something out but are just feeling kind of stuck, standup call is a great place to say, "hmmm, I can keep working on this, but if someone has some time, I could sure use a second brain to help."
If you don't have a tool or an easy to update document that shows this at a glance, then you have a problem. If you are asking people to give you all this information and then trying to collate it, then you have a problem. If people are not very simply causing this information to be visible as part of their normal workflow, then you have a problem.
Meetings are not the solution to any of these problems. What meeting are good for is: Human contact. People often find that if they don't interact directly with someone that the other person might have important information that isn't being shared. The longer the time between contact, the more that irrational feeling grows. Not everybody feels that way. I don't and it took me years before I realised that it is hugely important for other people.
The best thing I can say is that, if you don't have a short meeting where people can fist-bump, eventually someone on your team is likely to go crazy and cause huge problems. Usually that person is your manager, as it turns out.
My advice is to treat any substantive conversation in standup as being something to be fixed. You don't want that. You want people to show up, complain about how boring standup is and disappear. Every time you find important information showing up in standup, ask yourself how it could have been shared more easily as a normal part of the work flow. Keep working at it and eventually standup will be all fist-bump and no content.
You know what perpetuates people not taking the meeting seriously? Having a 10 minute meeting every day just for fist-bumps.
- Quick, 5 to 10 minutes
- Strictly focused on current status and blockers,
- Attended only by people who are directly working on the same project.
- Has someone designated to run the standup, who is empowered to table any discussions that start to drift.
