What's the ideal length of a standup?

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

I was part of many teams over the length of my career, and I keep finding 2 extremes when it comes to standups: they either last under 10 minutes or they go on for almost an hours. It's no surprise to anyone, that I prefer the first. 

Now, what do you think an ideal standup should take? 
What is your advice for optimizing long standups? Especially, what I can do as a relatively new member of the team. 

We don't have a scrum master or someone 100% focused on agile practices. 

[Amanda Barber]

We keep ours pretty focused and then have a post-standup for further conversation. I think it helps that I have a hard cutoff at the end of our meeting so it has to end, haha! At a prior company, we actually pivoted to required daily standups in Slack kept to the 3 basic standup questions and then our daily calls were brief times to connect on a more personal level. 

When using Jira, there's a timer option in the standup view if you want to try to keep people on time!

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

thanks, I wish we could be that disciplined, I'll try pushing for the hard cutoff as a start, I'll let you know how it goes 

[Stephen_Lugton]

HI @zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_ 

At some point you'll probably be told that:

A daily stand-up should be strictly timeboxed to 15 minutes maximum, regardless of team size.

If you take the view that Agile 

prioritizes adaptability, continuous feedback, and collaboration over rigid, long-term planning.

then sticking to a rigid 15 minutes maximum doesn't seem to be agile!

But saying that, a small team should be able to finish their stand up within 15 minutes.

I typically allow 1.5 to 2 minutes per person, so for my current team which has grown recently to 12 as we've recently amalgamated 2 teams to make cross training easier, I would expect the stand-up to be up to 20 minutes, but usually less.  And to be fair the first few minutes of that are more casual personal connections to kick off the day.

Any more than that and you're doing a status update rather than a stand-up, especially if it's an hour long.

And I'm also not rigid when it comes to stand-up content, and allow brief expansions on

• What did I do yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• Do I have any blockers (impediments)?

For example, if one team member gives an update where they have a blocker I will allow the rest of the team the chance to offer advice on how to resolve that blocker (but get the relevant people to pick up on it outside of the stand-up as needed)

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

Thanks @Stephen_Lugton our team is 10 people right now, and I believe that is on the higher side, and it's definitely one of the main reasons it takes that much. 

I agree with you, it's good to be flexible and adapt to the daily content, not just keeping to the 3 questions strictly.  

[Sarah Rank]

Yes! I think it's important to remind the team it's not a status report. Blockers should for sure be identified, if any. And an engaging dialogue - "here's where I need help" {others chime in on how they can help the team get to the finish line}

[Sarah Rank]

Ideally, 15 minutes of time well-spent. Valuable, productive conversation.

[zoltanersek _outpostlabs_dev_]

@Sarah Rank thank you, I agree with you, maximum 15 minutes. 

It would be awesome if that were the case

[Stephen_Lugton]

You've raised a good point there @Sarah Rank , the stand up needs to have value. 

I once took over a team that another delivery manager had been scrum mastering for and he just wanted a quick snappy response from everyone such as

"I worked on ticket Jira-1111 yesterday, I'll work on it again today."  

That was all he wanted.  I could have got that from the Jira board! 

To get value out of a stand up you need more than that, e.g.

"For ticket Jira-1111, I got the connector between the data and the dashboard working, it now shows monthly data but needs tidying up, I'll work on that today and demo to the PO later, there's nothing that I'm aware of that's going to block me."

As soon as the other delivery manager left I changed the format of stand ups to ask for that extra detail.