If you are the manager of a software development team that works along the lines of the Scrum framework, you most definitely run daily standups every day. And I am sure you are familiar with why they were included in the first place. The benefits, as we know, encompass all industries. But what is it about them that development teams can't do without?
You must have observed how your team members communicate in daily standups. This collaboration is what helps them align all efforts and ensure everyone is on the same page.
The standup meetings you conduct require your team to report the blockers to progress so that they can get those resolved quickly after the call. This is how you also ensure that your team can continue with their task with absolute clarity.
Also, you conduct your standups daily. This means that your team members are aware that they are required to report to everyone about their progress the next day, and they work with a sense of accountability. This eventually ensures a steady pace of work and projects delivered within deadlines.
Everything above looks so proper with no problems, right? But do daily standups really pan out this way for all of us every day? Unfortunately, no.
What comes in the way of achieving these ideal scenarios, and how can you get there? Let's angle our camera downward.
Potential problems that may arise during a traditional stand-up call
Problem #1: A system hurdle
You and your team are working on-site, from the office. Members of the team who work from home remotely and live in a different time zone are on a call with the rest of the team for the daily standup. You are halfway into the meeting and are answering a query that a team member raised when your audio stops working. So, while your team can see you articulating words, they are not able to hear what it is that you are saying. The entire team now waits as you try to figure out the issue with your audio. This glitch extends the stand-up meeting beyond the 15-minute duration.
Problem #2: Issues with punctuality
You and most of your team members are diligent about starting your daily standup meetings on time. But there are a few team members who always join the meeting late, even when it is held virtually on snowy days. Although they do manage to be punctual a few times, often there is one or the other for whom the entire team is waiting for the meeting to begin. This has been going on for quite some time. The delay makes the team's early-day enthusiasm dip, and the meeting that began late gives way to a later start to the day, encroaching on subsequent meetings and tasks.
Problem #3: Challenges with team expansion
Your company is expanding and recruiting more employees. This has also increased the number of members that participate in the daily standup. The meeting that initially ended within 15 minutes now surpasses the time limit. The longer duration is making everyone in the team impatient, and anyone hardly seems to focus on each other's progress updates.
Problem #4: Long periods of unutilized time
You attend four agile stand-up meetings daily with four different teams. You have spaced them 30 minutes apart to avoid any time clashes. You have scheduled the first meeting for 9 a.m. This is supposed to run until 9:30 a.m. However, more often than not, it ends before 9:30 a.m. Usually, you are left with more than 10 minutes till the next meeting starts and yet can't do anything else in that time thinking about the next call. The same happens with the other three calls, and you end up spending a considerable amount of time sitting idle rather than getting any productive work done in the morning.
Problem #5: Timezone challenges
You have a multicultural team with members from around the world. However, the difference in time zones is what is making some of them wake up too early and others stay available too late to participate in daily standup calls over Zoom. This is a pressing concern because it is also affecting the productivity and efficiency of these team members.
How can you make it right? Standup bots
1. Conduct a seamless standup.
So, you want to run a smooth daily standup. Here's the trick: run the Agile daily standup using a Slack daily standup bot or a Microsoft Teams bot like Sup because it eliminates any possibility of disruption by the systems you use, which is a common sight in synchronous meetings.
An added advantage of running asynchronous standups using these bots is that they take on the role of the facilitator. So, they also free you from the added responsibility of facilitating the meeting and remove any sort of dependency on you.
These standup bots automate the process of standup meetings and require you and your team members to inform everyone of their progress in text. So, your team members can simply type in the answers to the standup questions, and you need not be bothered about a paused meeting due to a system issue ever again!
2. Immunize meetings against delays.
Okay, so the issue with delays in joining a meeting is that it can happen to anyone, and more often than not, the reasons are hardly debatable, given the traffic on roads and the connectivity issues we experience on certain days. But does that mean you would need to compromise on your meetings' effectiveness? No.
Here's how you can achieve that: by using standup bots! Standup bots like Sup Bot allow you to conduct asynchronous standup meetings. This means you and your team can get informed of progress reports in the morning time slot without having to wait for everyone to join first (what would normally happen if you conducted a synchronous standup meeting).
Since your team is no longer required to delay responding to the standup questions, they can make the most of the early-hour vitality and start with the following commitments on time.
3. Embrace the ease of scaling teams.
Oh yes, there is this looming worry with every new member added to the team-the standup meeting getting extended beyond the 15-minute limit. But guess what? You can eliminate this possibility by making use of standup bots.
Employing a Microsoft Teams bot or a Slack daily standup bot to run asynchronous daily standups gives you this added advantage. Therefore, the size of your team has no bearing on your daily standups when you use a standup bot. So, even if your team expands, it takes everyone only 2 minutes to share their progress and blockers asynchronously.
Once they share their updates, you can go through the shared information properly and utilize the time gained to hold a meeting to address the blockers without holding up everyone in the standup meeting (that would normally happen in a synchronous meeting). Your team members submit their standup responses on the company's designated chat application, and the standup meeting gets done within the same time as before your team grew.
So, you ensure the effectiveness of the standup meetings, and your team responds to the standups with the same energy!
4. Eliminate idle time to optimize productivity.
We all attend meetings to get something done. And that's what stand-up meetings do too. But when these very meetings take away the time for productive work by leaving you with idle time, are you really getting anything done?
You can take care of this by using a standup bot to run asynchronous standup meetings. This means that regardless of the number of standup meetings you are a part of, you can receive and view progress updates from all teams once they share them asynchronously on Slack or Microsoft Teams.
So, you can now make both your meetings and minutes count!
5. Achieve a flexible schedule.
Yes, I understand how difficult it is to conduct effective standup meetings daily with all team members. And how it gets even more difficult to maintain the same effectiveness when your team members are spread across different timezones! But is there a fix to this? Certainly! You can now conduct daily standups in user timezones asynchronously using standup bots that empower you to do so.
Standup bots like Sup allow your team members working from different timezones to respond to the follow-up at the scheduled time, yes, but in their local timezone! This ensures everyone can attend the daily standup at their convenience in their local timezone while maintaining the quality of their work performance.
Run an asynchronous stand-up for your development team.
You will find a lot of options for stand-up bots for your development team that can be used on Slack or Microsoft Teams
Add to Slack
Add to Teams
Add to WebexSup Bot is a daily standup bot that operates on both Slack and Microsoft Teams. Sup offers you a fix for every unfavorable situation that was discussed above and more. In addition to the said abilities, Sup can:
- Customize your stand-up questions.
Sup allows you to tailor the daily stand-up questions for your development team according to your requirements. You can add, delete, edit, and re-order the standup questions. You can also select the question type you want as per your team's requirements.
- Send reminders to your team members.
Sup ensures that your team responds to the standup questions. It employs two methods to do so. Firstly, it allows you to send periodic reminders that prompt team members after some time has passed since the scheduled time. You can send the reminders once, twice, or thrice after a period of 15, 30, or 60 minutes after the scheduled time.
Secondly, you can send manual reminders using the custom reminder feature to team members when they have missed periodic reminders or when you need to check team progress urgently.
- Integrate mood tracking with stand-ups.
Few standup bots allow you to integrate mood tracking into their standup bots. Sup enables you to do so so that you can receive valuable insights about your team's motivation through:
The average mood score on the daily standup summary.The average mood over time (the current week, the past week, the current month, and the past month) on the app dashboard.The weekly mood report on the last working day of the week.The average team mood is shown on the standup details page, as shown below.
- Pause standups on holidays/leaves.
Sup mutes all standup notifications on team holidays and when someone takes leave. This way, you won't have to manually pause the standups during team-offs, and your team won't get reminders about it while on leave. The integration with a shared Google Calendar also enables you to seamlessly sync holidays so that you can find all holidays in one place.
- Offer analytics derived from standups.
Sup empowers you with insightful data and analytics that help you identify the team members you can always count on (the team member with the highest standup response submission rate) and the workday that can turn out best for the team (the happiest day).
Sup also allows you to request a custom stat as per your requirements.
See how you can create an asynchronous standup using Sup below.
Conclusion
There are so many things that can go wrong if you run your daily standups synchronously. On the other hand, there are just so many things going right with asynchronous standups that it will be unreasonable if you decide to stick to the usual methods of running standups for your development team. So, why ponder? Get ready and hop on to Sup Bot.
