The goals of the daily stand-up are GIFTS

There are several goals for a daily stand-up meeting:

·         To help start the day well

·         To support improvement

·         To reinforce focus on the right things

·         To reinforce the sense of team

·         To communicate what is going on

As a mnemonic device, think of GIFTS:

Good Start, Improvement, Focus, Team, Status

Good Start

Good standups are crisp and motivating. A lot of standups are bad. They have the enervating effect of an hour-plus weekly status meeting, only spread out over a week.

-- Brian Marick, "Latour 3: Anthrax and standups"

Good Start means that the stand-up meeting should give energy, not take it. Energy comes from instilling a sense of purpose and urgency; a clear sense of the purpose and a clear understanding what needs to be done to achieve it. It's important to distinguish this from "false urgency", where people are geared up for activity but are without shared direction.

Improvement

The purpose is not to meet... it is to improve.

-- Joe Ely, "More on Daily Start-Up Meetings"

We can't fix problems we don't know about so a large part of stand-ups is about exposing problems to allow us to improve. Improvement is not just about problem solving though. Sharing better techniques and ideas is also important.

Focus

Focus on the baton, not the runners

It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity.

Team

More so than artificial “team-building” exercises, effective teams are built by regularly communicating, working, and helping each other. This is also strongly tied with team members helping each other with shared obstacles. And an effective team is autonomous, otherwise known as self-managing.

The stand-up should be supporting the creation of an environment that encourages people to raise problems by constructing a narrative of other people helping when problems are raised.

Status

Status is about answering a couple questions:

How is the work progressing?

Is there anything else interesting that the team should know?

There should be other additional mechanisms to answer these questions but the daily stand-up is another opportunity to ensure valuable information doesn’t fall through the cracks.

Thanks,

Jak

Source: http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html