In the event you feel every day standups should not helpful on your data science team, you is perhaps right
One of the crucial common meetings or rituals for an agile team is the every day standup. It is normally short (max. quarter-hour), happens mostly at the identical time of the day, and is mandatory for each team member to affix. In theory, this meeting could be an amazing method to align the team and ensure every team member knows what the others are currently working on and surfaces which challenges they face. That made every day standups also a best seller for data teams. To this point, so good, and when you feel standups are an enormous help on your data team and make you efficient, no have to proceed reading because “never change a running system”.
“…a variety of teams perform every day standups simply because someone told them to or because they were all the time done.”
Nonetheless, in practice, every day standups are rarely as helpful as described above. Nearly all of data teams I do know struggle to persist with the timeline, and other teams struggle to get all the time everyone to affix or to be prepared. All of those are clear signs that the team has a necessity for deeper discussions, or that they don’t see an enormous value within the standup. Even for teams without these issues who’ve skilled standups by the book, because of the short time, the standup is usually on such a high level that it’s more of a reporting tool moderately than helping the team to do their work. I do imagine that a variety of teams perform every day standups simply because someone told them to or because they were all the time done.
This leads to data teams having unnecessary meetings each day summing as much as about 1.15h of useful time for every team member per week. After all, one solution might be to follow the common agile and scrum advice more strictly. But there’s another choice: reconsider what you truly want to unravel with these meetings. Following, I’ll present you the way you’ll be able to easily replace your every day standups with alternatives and use the saved time for weekly team times that allow for deep dives supporting your data scientists’ and data analysts’ needs.
Since every day standups have been proven to be useful, it will not be that each data team should now stop that practice. Nonetheless, there is perhaps quite just a few teams for which it might be helpful to try other rituals. One method to discover is to consult with the team openly and directly. Certain team members probably have already got a robust opinion on this topic. Otherwise, I’ll offer you an inventory of points where I’d consider a brand new approach if at the least certainly one of the next points is true:
- You do standups only because others do it
- You do standups only since it was done before you joined the team
- Your standups go often over time
- In your standups, the team commonly discusses private topics
- Often team members are absent from the standup
- Most team members should not prepared or don’t have anything to bring up
- The standup is more a reporting to the team leader moderately than helping the team members
If a number of of the above-mentioned points are true, your team might profit from a distinct approach. Nonetheless, the query about alternatives may be very much depending on the reply to the fundamental query: “What are standups alleged to improve in your team?”. While you find a solution to that query, coming up with alternatives could be straightforward. For me, the aim of every day standups is 3-fold and I’d solve each purpose individually. Those 3 purposes are:
- Team update: inform the team on what everyone seems to be currently working on and which challenges they face.
- Support: getting help from team members to unravel complicated problems.
- Social: coming together as a team and developing harmony.
(1) For the aim of updating the team on existing work and challenges, it’d thoroughly be an choice to don’t have any meeting in any respect. Such an update is on a really high level that might easily be done offline with a virtual standup. As an example, we’re using a geekbot for slack that asks all team members to supply a brief update. Other alternatives might be to make use of technical drawings or an agile work management tool and be sure every team member updates their tasks/cards each day.
(2) To be sure every team member gets the support they need, I highly recommend having at the least once per week an extended team meeting, something we call “team time”. This meeting ought to be 30–45 min long and ensure there’s enough time to actually unravel an issue and find an answer. Every team member can propose a subject and the team discusses it together. If there aren’t any challenges to debate, this can be an amazing forum for other ways of information share. If you find yourself summing up these costs, you will likely be in the same and even costlier range than every day standups, but those meetings are literally helpful since they permit the team to unravel problems and share knowledge and, with that, replace other meetings and make work more efficient.
(3) The social aspect is something that is never stated as a necessity for every day standups. But, for me, this can be a misconception. A healthy and social team will all the time be an efficient team. Developing a correct team atmosphere and spirit ought to be key and within the interest of everyone. The above-mentioned team times could serve that purpose but on top of that, there ought to be regular social events or other forms allowing for social interaction.
Looking back, running standups with dedicated meetings and using that point for an extended deep-dive team time meeting has been top-of-the-line decisions for my team previously. In reality, we’re having 2 team times per week.
In case your data team will not be seeing the necessity for normal standups, which may indicate that other alternatives are more useful. High-level team updates could be achieved with automatic chat tools, deep dive topics could be discussed in dedicated team meetings, and social events can ensure harmony. Based on the team’s needs, those alternatives might take the identical period of time but will make the team more efficient in the long term.
All images, unless otherwise noted, are by the writer.