15 Minute Meetings
“A stand-up meeting (or simply "stand-up") is a meeting in which attendees typically participate while standing. The discomfort of standing for long periods is intended to keep the meetings short.” (Wikipedia, 2020)
The stand-up meeting has been traditionally used in software development projects following Scrum or Kanban methodologies. The intention is to meet for 15-minutes and facilitate the daily commitment between team members along with the advanced warning of potential challenges.
Following a basic agenda, each team member must answer 3 questions:
1. What was completed since the last stand-up?
2. What is planned until the next stand-up?
3. Have you encountered any issues, blockers or expect delays with your tasks?
Having the answers to these three questions every day will provide a recurring platform to coordinate efforts and proactively resolve issues in a short and concise manner.
So why not consider this concept beyond software projects? Productive collaboration does not happen instantly, it must be built with trust, respect and a common goal. Therefore, using the stand-up for all project methodologies or even as a mechanism to facilitate proactive and consistent communications between employees, managers and leaders at all organizational levels should make sense, right?
Can you imagine how answers to the above questions in 15-minutes a day for each of your projects can ensure your planned tasks and activities are aligned across multiple stakeholders? Or, if you are an organizational leader and measure your teams and employees via KPIs or goals, the stand-up could provide an opportunity to check-in with your direct reports or leaders to see what efforts they have done and are doing to meet their goals.
However, prior to introducing the stand-up into your project or organization, there are a few considerations to make productive and effective use of everyone’s time.
● Agree with stakeholders on the project plan, milestones or goals prior to scheduling your stand-ups. A defined scope where roles, responsibilities, timeline and objectives should be agreed to in advance.
● Determine the recurring cadence for your stand-up (i.e. Daily, Every other day or Twice per week). Consistency in the scheduled days and time each week is critical. Also, be considerate of the timezones of your participants.
● Identify key stakeholders to invite. Limit the number of attendees to 8 critical participants on the project, milestone or goal. With only 15-minutes, you must consider the appropriate participant and time allotted for each participant
● Arrive early and start on-time. Stand-ups must proceed regardless of who is there or not...any clarifications, issues or concerns should be raised immediately after the stand-up with the impacted participant(s).
● Stay on topic; avoid interruptions and distractions. Based on the number of attendees, updates should be limited per participant (i.e. 75 seconds). Limit follow-up questions or clarifications taking longer than 45-seconds where participants will agree on a time to meet immediately after the stand-up.
The stand-up will be difficult at the beginning and likely exceed 15-minutes the first few times. Don’t worry or give up, it will take time for you to feel comfortable managing this type of meeting and for your participants to get used to providing their updates concisely. In no time people will get on board and see the value of having a consistent mechanism to productively align with their colleagues and successfully deliver projects and achieve goals.
If you are looking for help to integrate the stand-up for your projects or organization, visit pm-rehab.com or email information@pm-rehab.com.