Keep Your Team On Track with Standups

Are you having a hard time keeping your team members focused and on track? Or maybe you have a team member who gets lost in the weeds for extended periods of time. Or maybe your team does not communicate enough with one another. One technique that I have borrowed from the Agile world is the use of the Standup Meeting.
The standup meeting is a very useful tool to help you – the project lead – keep team members on task as well as get the team in the habit of keeping each other in the loop without spending hours every week in endless, agonizing status meetings.

Standup meetings provide a simple means for team members to keep each other up to date without spending a lot of time in meetings or having to write and read piles of status reports. They focus on quick discussion of progress, plans and problems. This allows team members to get timely updates about others’ progress while you – the project lead (or manager) – quickly determines their tasks for the day by virtue of the team’s obstacles.

There are two key aspects to the Standup Meeting that will make it a powerful tool. The first is in the name of itself – “standup”. Standing encourages concise discussion of progress, plans and problems. When sitting, people get too comfortable and will expand unnecessarily on some points of the update. Standing promotes the feeling of urgency – of a quick hallway conversation and the team will focus on the really critical bits. This is important because if the meetings are short, concise and informative, the team will see value in them and not try to avoid the meeting. A general guideline is to keep the meeting limited to 10 or 15 minutes.

The second key aspect is a little more subtle and will start the team down the path of richer collaboration: encouraging team members to provide updates to each other, not just to the project manager. By doing this, the team starts to see the Standup Meeting as a tool for coordinating their work and keeping up to speed with what others are doing, rather than a necessary evil endured only to silence the constant "are you done yet?" questions.