The intent of a team standup/scrum meeting is to resynchonize on the work in progress and decide how we, as a team, are going to complete it. If your standup is horrible, then focus on the intent, not the format you’ve been doing. What would you have to change to make the meeting useful?

If your immediate response is that the meeting will never be useful then you likely fall into one of two groups:

  1. You are a highly effective team that is collaborating constantly and is never out of sync. See teams doing ensemble work / mob programming for examples of these. Standups are complete waste for a team that is never out of sync.

  2. You aren’t a team at all. You’re a group of individuals, each working on your own thing and you don’t care what others are doing because you truly aren’t working towards shared goals. Standups may well be a complete waste for you. Of course, most of agile assumes that you’re a team so if you aren’t, then you have some other things to discuss.

Perhaps you’re thinking that you’re somewhere in between these two extremes. You are a team, working on a shared thing (product, project, etc) but you’re not collaborating constantly. Well then you do need some point where you come back together and that’s the point of the standup. You’ve just established that you do need one and the only question is how will you make that useful for you?

This is your meeting. If you decide that it isn’t needed because you’re never out of sync or you really aren’t a team, then stop doing it. If you decide that you do need it, make it effective.