this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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It makes sense if you're in an industry with hotspot flare-ups. I work MSP IT and those morning meeting are the way my team asks for help on pressing issues, or rings the alarm bells on business impacting outages. Additionally, Tier I helpdesk and Tier III projects never communicate, so the SUM is where T1 hears about where projects are at (in case they get the breakfix for that item) and T3 knows how swamped T1 is and what mobile techs are out, and T2 gets a chance to tell us if the flow from T1 and T3 into the "escalation sandwich" is too much. And we genuinely have it down pat to 5-10min.
Don't get me wrong, I've had shitty SUM requirements, but when they're done right, it's better than a state of the union email/Teams message.
Still could just be a slack thread or a dashboard. Putting people in a room every day is simply wasteful, even if it "works okay". When I managed a team I hated them, but we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week, so I guess you have to be tactical about when you pull everyone off task to huddle.
It really depends on the group, the workload, and the structure. I’ve got two fairly ADHD employees that love rabbit holes and one that’s great at focusing, but regularly needs some guidance. A daily morning touchpoint meeting like a standup does wonders for getting us all on the same page, making a few quick decisions, and unblocking them all. It’s honestly the best 15-20 min we could spend for productivity and engagement and our most productive meeting of the day.
We also just do it at our desk or virtually on WFH days because it’s a waste of time to walk 5 min to a room and back when we can use that time solving problems.
If we had less ticket churn, or less interruptions from on call/support work, we could probably do it just MWF, but that’s just not in the cards.
Yeah similarly I have no idea what the fuck my boss is doing. Just no communication. That’d be fine if we weren’t the entire engineering department and I routinely have to deal with stuff he did without mentioning to me
So, it's not actually a stand-up meeting.
We do in fact, stand up for it.
People working at home have to stand up? So, their cameras are pointed at their bellies?
Stand up desks are a thing!
In my experience that highlights a difference in each of your "scales"; how long you can concentrate and focus; how often your interruptions are and how aligned your whole team is.
It sounds like you get less interruptions, more focus on items and your team is more aligned. Which means a lower cadence meeting works well, because you can spend more focus time.
For @[email protected] I suspect they are the opposite. More disruptions and less focus means you need a higher cadence and more chances to keep teammates up to date on who is doing what.
Personally, using teams/slack/whatever to keep up to date on this doesn't work. As you can read on message, think someone is on one thing and miss the next message where they've changed tack. The DSU gives everyone a "reset" point. If you can get away with that weekly, absolutely great.
Where I currently work, SRE (but I'm much more tooling and product focussed and less on-call). My on-call teammates need a daily, I can comfortably join them 2 or 3 times a week on their DSU and not miss things.
See, the previous MSP workplace I was at did one a week. If something was pressing the tech would inform the service manager, who would tap the correct resources to assist. The stand up was mostly just reviewing all service ticket requests and making sure nothing was falling through the cracks, so that if someone had a list of lower priority work but got slammed with something intense that took them away from their usual follow ups, those less important jobs could be reassigned to someone with the bandwidth to take them on. Also to ensure that any new tickets are being picked up in a timely fashion (not generally a problem, just doing a health check on it). Took ~1hr across all tickets and techs to review. Almost never longer, but frequently shorter.
It was a small team and we would continually keep in contact throughout the day by phone and slack. Nobody needed baby sitting, we were all professionals and adults.
I only left that position because the owner was cheap and continually denied raises. I didn't see a raise in ~4 years and decided to find something that paid better. I couldn't keep paying my bills with all the COVID inflation; I'd still be there if I was paid better.
There may be some scenarios where they are helpful, but I think it's possible to do it asynchronous in those situations.
If there's a critical issue that needs to be dealt with ASAP, there should be an escalation process.
You can have reoccurring (or ad hoc) meetings to discuss projects across teams. If the standup is a slack thread, any interested party could view it (based on channel permissions).
It shouldn't be on the individual members to bring up poor processes or that they're overworked in stand-ups. That should flow through their managers
Not trying to be difficult with my responses, just adding my insight from years in tech across a few different positions and companies. I am happy to hear that your team has a process that works!
Only if handled properly, which a lot of supposed "stand-ups" aren't.
I don't see how you can have a meeting with members of 3 different tiers of support where progress on multiple projects is summarized in a way that someone not on the projects can get anything meaningful out of it, in addition to tier 1 gets to talk about how swamped they are, and tier 2 gets to talk about the flow from tier 1 into some delicious sandwich, and have that only take 5 minutes. I'm guessing that's a minimum of 15 people in the meeting, if you have multiple tiers and everyone's present. To get things done in 5 minutes means that on average everyone only gets to talk for 24 seconds. If you have people who aren't talking, that suggests they don't need to be in the meeting.
In addition, the whole concept of "standing up" for a meeting is stupid. Sure, it means meetings don't last as long, but that's because it's uncomfortable. Plus there are social dynamics issues you introduce between tall people (often men) and short people (often women).