The Corporate Standup
Sometimes I think about the misfortunate developers who worked in a time before Agile. They had no daily corporate standup to turbocharge their velocity. It was common for them to fill out status reports as well, how primitive!
In all seriousness though, the corporate standup is now a staple in the enterprise. Everyone is now “Agile!” You can hardly blame the enterprises though. When a marketing tsunami like Agile sweeps over the landscape, everyone tends to hop on or risk being regarded as a legacy IT shop.
Daily Status Meeting
Why do we have daily standups? It’s all part of being Agile, right? Well, Agile does indeed promote having daily standup meetings, but the reason for them is the issue.
The corporate standup in my experience does not revolve around a cohesive project. It is instead a rebranded daily status meeting. A meeting where management routinely attends and impacts the discourse.
The focus of the daily meeting then becomes telling a good story to the manager. And avoiding the unpleasantness of publicly calling out gremlins that may be lurking.
Ultimately the meeting just becomes a synchronous way to report what each person is working on to the manager. Most importantly, it’s not focused on delivering better software more quickly.
Unfocused
Its nebulous focus is one of the biggest problems of the corporate standup. This results in meeting members working on vastly different things that have no relevance to others.
It’s a common occurrence for two people in the corporate standup to dive into minutiae that is wholly irrelevant to others. This is a telltale sign that your standup is unfocused and operating at a deficient layer of abstraction.
It takes an iron-willed scrum master to prevent the constant side-tracking that occurs and quite frankly, I have yet to see one in action.
Carrot and Stick Management
Moreover, the daily corporate standup smells an awful lot like carrot and stick management. All the direct reports must gather every day and give a verbal accounting of their actions to the manager!
This is basically what the corporate standup consists of in far too many places and is far removed from the real aims of the Agile approach.
Do you think the manager or director or VP is having a daily standup meeting reporting what they’ve done to the CTO? Is the CTO having a daily standup meeting with the CEO or Board of Directors? Yeah, right!
The daily accountability charade is reserved for the line level staff. The Agile approach can be fantastic for delivering better software more quickly. However, in the corporate world the ceremonies have been hijacked to serve a far less useful purpose.
The Costs
The corporate standup has many costs. It is first and foremost a huge waste of time. Calculate the cost to the organization of 10 people wasting 30+ minutes a day in a status meeting and it’s staggering!
Usually a quick IM or email would easily replace the standup milieu and save everyone a massive amount of time. If you absolutely cannot get rid of the daily standup meetings, then making them asynchronous is likely to help.
See tools like Standuply as a means to restore sanity into your development team’s existence.
Another big cost of the corporate standup is it encourages slow progress. Too often people wait for the standup to communicate issues.
In other words, it becomes too convenient to talk about things at the standup which deserved immediate and focused attention. This is bad process run amok and is endemic to the corporate standup.
Finally, the daily corporate standup occurs in an ephemeral medium. It’s a verbal exchange, therefore most will be forgotten or ignored by the majority of the participants. If the meeting was focused and quick, this would be less of a problem.
However, we all know that corporate standups are not focused or quick. Moreover, any signal in a daily standup will likely go unnoticed amidst the vast amounts of noise. The signal to noise ratio here is awful and so people will often miss things.
Summary
The corporate standup is generally Agile in name only. It’s most often a daily status meeting masquerading as an Agile ceremony.
Daily corporate standups tend to be unfocused. In short, too many people working on too many different things.
Carrot and stick management is anathema in the tech world. Yet it’s become ubiquitous under Agile auspices.
The costs of the corporate standup are significant. Wasted time, encouraging slow progress, and the substandard ephemeral medium are all detriments endemic to the corporate standup.
Like anything in tech, Agile ceremonies are tools. They work very well in some scenarios and very badly in others.