How to do your daily stand ups with a distributed team

Published on 11 June 2015 • Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

With an agile team, you should meet daily for a quick meeting. Normally, that takes the form of each person answering a three-question status update (What did I achieve? What will I achieve? What is blocking me?). For a team working together, it means these steps:

1. Team arrives at the shared team board
2. Team goes around and gives a status update
3. Team goes back to work

Just because your team is distributed doesn’t mean this shouldn’t happen—it just means you’ll find a few extra steps:

1. Team members who work together go to a booked meeting room (you need a meeting room so those remote can hear over the normal work environment noise)
2. You’re surprised to find someone in the room
3. Explain that you booked the room
4. Wait for them to leave the room
5. Connect the projector
6. Realize you left your microphone in your laptop bag, return to your desk, get it, and return to the meeting room
7. Plug it in
8. Open the digital scrum board
9. Start the meeting software and join the meeting
10. See one remote team member is already there—apologize for being late
11. Wait for a response
12. Wait for a response again
13. Realize they can’t hear you
14. Both the remote team member and you try to figure out what’s not working
15. Figure out that there’s a mute hardware button that—today (and today only)—is turned itself on
16. Try again—success! They can hear you now
17. Wait for the product owner to join
18. Give up waiting and kick off the meeting (everyone is seated now because no one’s legs last that long)
19. Go around the team and give status updates
20. The product owner joins during the second-to-last team member’s status update
21. The product owner starts sharing a bunch of bugs and task updates that someone else is now capturing live
22. Finish the status updates
23. The team decides to use this time—while they’re all here—to discuss technical info around the new stuff from the product owner
24. The product owner is late for the meeting and has to disconnect
25. Someone walks into the meeting room and asks if this is the meeting for organizing the year-end party
26. Silence
27. No one answers
28. Silence
29. The Scrum master answers
30. The team discusses technical issues. Half of them are marked as needing more info and will be discussed with the product owner in tomorrow’s meeting
31. The call ends
32. The team goes to get coffee (they need it) and says how glad they are using agile—because they save so much time with fewer meetings
33. Two hours later
34. Another team member joins the call alone because the time zone they’re in changed to daylight savings today