Distributed agile practice – stand up meeting (1)

Stand up meeting is a very common agile practice, but we need to do some changes in offshore team. Now let me introduce our stand up meeting practice which helps us to resolve communication problem in Offshore Team/Distributed Agile team.

Some offshore team usually uses daily report email instead of standup meeting, but we prefer stand up meeting very much. Because a long time formatting email can’t make people pay attention to it, people can easy forget it or setup an email rule to put it to low priority item. But team sharing is very important stuff in an offshore team, without team sharing, team member can’t know how to continue, someone will broke work, and someone do same tasks. It’s terribly things in offshore team. People will lose trust with each other. Daily report email make team missing and change share to report progress to team leader and also lose good opportunity for communication.

Stand up meeting is an easy way to sharing, transparence and make team trust each other. Just do some change, it will work for offshore team very well:

• Team members must write owner Whiteboard before Stand up meeting. Most offshore team working in different time zone, same working time will be very short for all team members. We must make sure stand up meeting short, efficient and easy to remember. So if team member can have 10 ~ 20 minutes before stand up meeting to finger out what is real Obstacle or question; What I need to do at tomorrow; What I done today. Then we can easy use some screen share tools to share Whiteboard to each other and make meeting efficient and short in 10 ~ 20 minutes base on team size. Even if some team member are not very good with another language like English, but you write it done, another one can easy read and understand with your short introduce. After meeting you can collect all whiteboards and send to everyone, but it is only for backup, you must all join the meeting not look at backup file. If you also have a Kanban, you can also take a photo with it and also include in backup file.

• Still stand up for meeting and use web camera. Even team members are not in same office, but I still suggest you really stand up for this meeting, stand up can make meeting productivity and also relax your body a while :). If you have a web camera, I suggest you use it, it is better if you talk with real guys, not a cold, foursquare machine :). If you see people each other, you can easy to setup a trust relationship.

• A flexibility working time. I still have project with 12 hours’ time different, how can we find solution for same working time? We offer flexibility working time for team members, if you want to only working in office 7 hours and 1 hour at home, it is ok for our team. So we can find 1 or 2 hours same working time at least with 12 hours’ time different. We also offer a new internet subscription, if your home internet access is real bed.

• If you write whiteboard, you'd better not read it in stand up meeting. Otherwise team member can read it by themselves, you just need to say 'Please read my today whiteboard.’ So we usually don't only say what we written in whiteboard, say something extension. Whiteboard should be an outline

• Time box must be used in stand up meeting.

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/MaYunian/archive/2012/07/20/2601635.html