When I first engage with a team, I’m focused on ensuring that we have an effective daily meeting, and I’m less concerned about how long it takes. Are we talking about all the things that we should be talking about? Are are actively collaborating on the work?
I’ve recorded a video on what I look for there.
Once we get to the point that the meeting is effective, we’ll often hear complaints about how long it takes. I routinely tell teams that it can be done effectively in less than five minutes, and most teams are highly skeptical of that. At least they’re skeptical until I’ve facilitated a couple and shown them what’s possible.
Note that if all we focus on is speed then we run the risk of having a ineffective meeting that was fast, and that defeats the whole point. We must retain the effectiveness of the meeting, while continuing to keep it short.
The first step is to start the meeting on time. This may seem obvious but most of these meetings don’t start on time; instead we sit around waiting for people to arrive. If the team is actively chatting with each other then this might be a good use of social time to build relationships, but I find that a significant number of teams just sit there staring at each other until it starts, and that’s complete waste.
If the meeting is booked for 9:00 then we start at 9:00 regardless of who’s there. If people show up late, we do not recap for them. The research shows that not starting on time actually reduces both the expectations and effectiveness of that meeting, and I wrote about that recently.
Many teams rotate who will facilitate this meeting, and I find that to be an excellent practice. Where it becomes a problem is if we come into the meeting and nobody is sure whose turn it is. Make sure that this is clearly known before the meeting starts, or else we’re wasting time right at the beginning.
The intention of this daily meeting is to complete the work that has already started. All the conversations we’re having are focused on that one point. How do we get work done today? Maybe we’ll work together on the tickets or maybe we’ll split the work up and work individually. It’s during this meeting that we decide on our approach.
Any conversations that are not focused on getting work complete, are off topic, and while they may still be important to address while we’re all together, they go in the parking lot and we can come back to them at the end. Quite often these conversations don’t need everyone and so the relevant people can meet after the rest of the team has been allowed to leave.
We’re going to walk through every ticket on the board in priority order from most important to least. In general, items closer to done (further right on a typical board) are more important than items further away from being completed. If we do run out of time, this ensures that we’ve talked about all of the most important ones.
The priority sequence may be affected by classes of service such as expedited work being more important than standard. The key here is that each team will have their own understanding of priority and we walk the work in reverse order. Most important through to least important.
For each item, we need to talk about how we’re going to get it finished and that conversation will change depending on what state the work is in.
Each item on the board will be in one of three states.
- It’s active, in which case we want to know what work is remaining.
- It’s blocked, in which case we want to know what we’re doing to get it unblocked.
- It’s stalled, which means that we just don’t have the capacity to work on it right now because we’re so busy with other items that are either active or blocked.
For either active or blocked, we want to talk about what is being done and what is remaining so that we can look for opportunities to help each other. What we don’t care about is a status update of what we’ve already done. We don’t care that someone was stuck in meetings all day, we do care that they’ve got a lot of work left and that if someone helped them, we could get it done faster.
For stalled items, we generally just skip over them. If we have a lot of stalled items or some items remain stalled for a long time then that’s certainly a problem we should address, but one item that was stalled for a day or two isn’t a big deal. Move on.
At this point, as we’re walking across the items on the board, I see a lot of teams clicking into the ticket automatically to bring up all the details, so we’re switching from a board view to a details view and back, over and over. If someone asks the facilitator to pull up the details then by all means, do that. If we’re doing it just out of habit then we’re wasting time. There should be enough information visible on the front of the ticket to be able to talk about it in most cases.
Once we’ve walked through the board, we may have picked up some “parking lot” items. If they require the whole team then we can discuss them now. If they only require a subset then we let everyone else go.
Then we stop the meeting. While this sounds like the simplest of all the steps, it’s one that so many teams struggle with. “But we booked 15 minutes and we’ve only used six. Surely we should keep talking.” No, when we’ve satisfied the intent of the meeting then we stop. “Thanks for your time, the meeting is over.”
I’ll leave you with two last tips that both work at an unconscious level to make us move faster.
- You may have heard this meeting described as a stand-up, and the reason for that was that if we’re standing, we’re less comfortable and therefore we’re motivated to keep the meeting moving along. If we get too comfortable then the meeting starts to drag along.
- When I’m actively trying to speed the meeting up, I make a point of visibly timing the meeting. If we’re in person, I might write the time on a whiteboard, and keep a running tally of the recent times. If we’re remote, I’ll call it out. “Meetings over, six minutes today” At an unconscious level, this causes us to move a bit faster. When we stop timing it, we’ll see it start to drift back the other way, getting longer and longer.
When I’ve done this with teams as large as twenty people, we can get this meeting under five minutes in a relatively short time. The only exceptions are teams that are massively overburdened with WIP, and they have much more serious problems.
Try it, and see for yourself.