Scientific Ink

Dunrie Greiling Ph.D., Ann Arbor, MI 48105

IM/Chat Standup

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My goals for standup are:

  • actually communicate
  • get remote folks more familiar with each other (make Chicago and Berlin friends ;))
  • provide a forum so that I can act less as a clearinghouse/sole gate for communicating with remote folks (though I realize this is much of my job and will continue to be a big part)

We’ve moved to IM/chat standup as a test to solve the fact that remote folks have a very hard time hearing us quiet folks at HQ.

So far, the two standup addicts (me and talltom) are very chatty and slow, and the two IM pros are quick and to the point. I like the quickness, and to that end will try to type up a quick summary first and paste it in, but I miss something from the less efficient exchange of additional info and personality, so I think I’m going to continue to prattle a bit and encourage others to be a little less efficient if they are so moved.

Essentially, I think standup is a bit more than a task list–it is some kind of weird vehicle for team. Not only do we get a sense of what the larger group is doing on a task level, but at its best we get a glimmer for how individuals are doing at it. I miss some of the additional information exchange that happens when people go off topic or make a joke. But, I’ve been one of the people “in the room” for the conference call standups, so perhaps IM standup is actually a higher-bandwidth channel for the remote folks….

At a minimum, at least we’ve coined some new web acronyms: lbcot (let’s be careful out there-thanks to Stephen).

Virtual Stand-up: Extending the Circle

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So, a “stand-up” meeting is a communication ritual from Extreme Programming (XP). The developers were sick of long, boring meetings wasting all their time, so someone came up with the idea of ritualizing a quick and productive status meeting. Stand-up has to be short because no one is allowed to sit down.

I believe in stand-up, it works. While I have perpetuated the stand-up ritual in my new job, extending it to a mixed group of physically present and physically remote folks is challenging. It is harder when some have never participated in a stand-up “in person”. Still, the benefit of this quick check-in with (and I hope for) the remote folks outweighs the awkwardness.

Here are some general ground rules:

  • Stand-up happens at the appointed time with whomever is present. Currently ours happens at 10:30 AM, Eastern
  • Everyone stands
  • Participants pass a token: only the person holding the token speaks
  • The token-holder(s) should update the team on what has been accomplished since the last stand up, and what is coming this day. In a big or unfamiliar group, the token-holder starts with their own name, “Hi, I’m Joe, and today…” or in a paired environment, “Hi, I’m Joe,” “and I’m Susan, and we’re…“
  • The token-holder can ask the group for help to solve a problem, though things are solved off-line after stand-up with the appropriate folks
  • Stand-up should be called by an inanimate object rather than a person
  • The person at the end has to say “let’s be careful out there” or some variant on that phrase to close the meeting

Here are some ideas for making stand-ups happen with remote team members

  • Tokens need to be passed “virtually” to and back from conference call participants, with the order called out
  • Remote team members should be responsible for getting their own inanimate objects to remind them (alarm in calendar)

Rules of thumb for part-time team members

  • Part time folks should attend stand-ups part of the time.

I’m curious what others who have tried this think needs to be added to our ritual or to this description.

Sounds to me like you know what you want to be when you grow up….

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Last Thursday I had breakfast with a local usability guru. We caught up a bit on what each other have been doing, and he said, to my astonishment, the above line. I suppose I’m astonished because I feel like I’ve been in a kind of exploration free-fall for the last two years. I actually stopped, looked at him, and said “really?!” And then I desperately wanted him to tell me just what it was I had said, essentially what it was I wanted to be when I grew up. I need Tivo for conversations.

Anyway, I think I might have said something like this: not project management, not UI/interaction design, but people management. Specifically, I want to figure out how to make teams that work, teams where people contribute according to their individual talents, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I am interested in what makes workplaces successful and what makes people successful, how to foster growth and get out of the way and let people do stuff. Not that I know how to do all of this yet, but that’s what I want to be learning and doing.

I found the book First Break All the Rules to be exceptionally helpful in structuring some of my thinking on this. Basically, this book says, match people to jobs that take advantage of their natural abilities rather than try to fix them by forcing them to shore up weaknesses. The idea: people have almost unlimited potential in some areas and very limited potential in others. Don’t make everyone unhappy by forcing others to “stretch” in the wrong places. This book gave me permission not to try to work on all the weak places (say, public speaking) to try to make myself into something I’m not (say, comfortable with strangers) but instead leverage those things I naturally do and use them to everyone’s advantage. I naturally pay close attention to people–their moods, what they like, notice what they’re good at–and I naturally want to help. So, find a way to do more of that. I’m a bit stumped how to do this with a distributed team and whether new job was the right place to work on some of these things, but it is still early days yet, and much is possible.

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Reusable practices?

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Four months ago (March, 2006), I signed on to be Director of Operations at a small web company.

Tonight, I had dinner with a friend and former colleague. We’re both project managers and we both left an established XP shop in the beginning of this year. We compared notes on what we have tried in our new environments. Interestingly, we’ve been successful with different practices from the same set. She affirmed some of my experiences, and it was especially intriguing to hear where our experience differed. Here’s a little of my side of it. Sorry it is just a big list right now. I will expand certain parts of it sometime later….

[Read more…] about Reusable practices?