Walking The Board

In the traditional standup format everyone stands in a circle and each person, in order, gives an update. The updates follow the agile format:

• What they did yesterday
• What their plans are for today
• Are there any blockers

I have a number of problems with this format.

Context Switching

People don’t usually stand in any particular order so the updates from person to person often jump between the project(s) the team is working on and support tasks. Additionally, if we’ve sized our tasks correctly, then a single person could potentially be working on a new task each day. This makes sense to the person giving the update, but for everyone else, trying to track actual progress becomes increasingly difficult.

Project Status

Related to context switching, it’s nearly impossible tell the overall project status from this type of update. Even if you could figure out how many tickets were closed, without looking at the kanban board it’s nearly impossible to get even a sense of what is left todo on the project. Plus, this format does nothing to encourage people to actually update the kanban board, compounding the issue.

Public Speaking

Public speaking does not come naturally to everyone, even when presenting just to the team. I’m much more relaxed with it now, but there was a time when this type of setting would cause me enough stress and I would ignore whatever was being said and just rehearse what I was going to say. Then, after I gave my update, I would spend rest of the standup obsessing over the things I had messed up or forgotten to say.

Competition for Busiest

Without focus, the standup can become a passive competition for who is the busiest person.

• I’ve got a meeting with a customer today to talk over a feature they want added.

• Well I’ve got two meetings today to talk over features.

• I’ve got meetings pretty much all day long so I’m not likely going to get much else done.

It sounds silly, but it’s something I’ve seen happen at multiple companies, especially if people are feeling insecure (imposter syndrome). It can take the form of lamenting (but really bragging) about the number of meetings, or making the tasks you completed sound like herculean efforts. It’s pointless and unhealthy for the team.

Forced Update

Finally, it forces everyone to talk when they may not want to. Maybe they just got back from vacation and are still working at getting caught up. There have also been times in my career where my personal life has taken over and I’ve needed to take some time off, be it medical or family related. At the update I don’t want to go into details about what I’m dealing with. In fact, I may be at work specifically to take a break from the other stresses going on. The last thing I want to do is be forced to talk, or worse, explain why I don’t want to talk.

As an individual contributor I find this standup format stressful and as a project lead and manager I find it unhelpful. Instead I prefer using the standup time to walk the kanban board.

Walking the board

With most ticket tracking systems you can use swim lanes to split up your kanban board into project tasks and support tasks. Then, starting with the top swim lane, go down the Done column and each each owner can give an update for their ticket. (This also avoids that initial awkward moment of trying to figure out who should be the first to speak.)

Once the Done column is finished, move to column to the left (likely In Progress or Blocked) and repeat the process. Continue until you are done with all assigned tickets for that swim lane. Rinse and repeat for the next swim lane until all updates are done. The context switching is much less and the team can focus on what is being said instead of trying to memorize what they are going to say.

(Since Done is often an end state and you don’t necessarily want to re-walk this entire list every time, some teams will create a Closed column and use the standup as an opportunity to move tasks from Closed to Done.)

Closing comments

One critique of this format is that it is possible for a team member not working on a task to feel left out. There are a couple of ways to handle this: First although standup is suppose to be project focused, so I’ve always stressed that if you don’t have any updates for the project it is okay to not talk. (This assumes your team is a safe space where individuals won’t feel like they are being judged if they don’t talk.) But, if an individual really wants to explain to the team why they haven’t picked up any tasks, they should save that for the post-standup discussion. If, in the rare case, an individual is checking out and not picking up any tasks, that is something the manager should bring up during their 1:1 and not in front of the team.

As a project lead and manager I find walking the board to be significantly more useful as I can tell exactly the progress of the project (as I’m looking at the tickets) and I can also be sure that tickets for the project are up to date. As an individual contributor I don’t feel like I have to prepare as much for this standup and I can just attend and focus on what everyone else is saying.