The stand-up meeting is considered an important agile practice but why is it so important and how to you get started with this unusual meeting format? When you watch experienced teams run a stand-up, it seems so easy but what are the secret ingredients to hosting a great stand-up meeting? How do you move from the usual 1-hour snore fest status meeting to a short, sharp, engaged, active and valuable ritual? I use the Host Leadership metaphor to help to think about all the aspects needed to run a successful standup meeting.

1. How to Host a Successful Stand-Up
Meeting
Rod Sherwin
Solutioneer, Model Thinking
@RodSherwin
https://au.linkedin.com/in/rodsherwin

3. Quick Update – 1 mins in total
● What did you do on the weekend?
● What will you do at work tomorrow?

4. Quick Update - Debrief
● What did you experience?
● What did you learn?
● How did it feel?

5. What is a stand-up meeting?
Daily team-meetings to make commitments to
[fellow] team members. The daily commitments
allows participants to know about potential
challenges as well as to coordinate efforts to
resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues.
– Wikipedia

6. Agile Values?
● Individuals and interactions over processes
and tools
● Working software over comprehensive
documentation
● Customer collaboration over contract
negotiation
● Responding to change over following a plan
http://agilemanifesto.org/

7. Agile Principles?
#2 #4
#6 #11

8. Why do stand-up meetings work?
● Frequent face-to-face
syncronisation of the team to the
work and product direction

9. Why do stand-up meetings work?
● Team self-organises to solve issues – asking for and
offering help
● “Kill the monster while it’s small”

10. Why do stand-up meetings work?
● Daily comms within, into,
and out of the team
● Trigger for before and after
comms

11. Why do stand-up meetings work?
● Make progress visible – motivation and
momentum

12. Why do stand-up meetings work?
● Team sharing and bonding

13. Slow down to go faster
“If you want me to speak for two minutes you
give me a notification of two weeks; if you want
me to speak for five minutes, I should have a
notification of one week, but if you want me to
talk all day, here I am.”
– Anonymous

14. Host Leadership
by Mark McGerow & Helen Bailey
www.hostleadership.com

15. Who hosts your team?

16. Initiator
● How did your self-organising team decide to
have a daily stand-up?
● Did everyone give consent?
● Get things moving – small steps

17. Inviter
● Invite the team to participate
● Anyone else with work on the wall
● Everyone welcome to attend, listen and
possibly contribute

18. Space Creator
● Where are you having your stand-up?
● Ok for the number of people?
● Materials?
● Creative, emergent, problem solving space?

19. Space Creator
● Can the team customise their space?
● Proximity to other teams?
● Virtual space – video screens, standing height
● What messages is your space conveying?

20. Space Creator - Wall
● Virtual teams – duplicated wall or software wall
● Is all work on the wall?
● How easily can you adjust your wall?

21. Gatekeeper
● What time?
● Signals to start & end meeting. Other rituals?
● On topic or take offline
● Welcome and introduce visitors

22. Connector
● Asking for help – offering connections
● Dependencies – double-linking?
● Personal updates

23. Co-Participant

24. Basic Stand-Up format

25. Scrum Format
● Round robin
● Answer 3 questions:
– What did I do yesterday?
– What am I planning for today?
– Any blockers?

26. Variations
● What did I do or learn yesterday that is
important or interesting to the team?
● What am I going to do today, and whom do I
need to collaborate with?
● What's preventing me from working intelligently
and efficiently towards the team's goals?
Ref: Rob Myers

27. Variations
What happended since the last meeting that
you didn't expect?
Ref: Elise Keith, Lucid Meetings

28. Walking the Wall
● Work across the wall from right
to left e.g.
– New cards in Done
– Cards in QA
– Cards in Doing
– New cards

29. Summary of Benefits

30. Next Steps

32. References
● It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup
Meetings – Jason Yip
● Consent based decision making – Bernhard Bockelbrink
and James Priest