10 Tips for How to Run Effective Daily Standups
How to run effective daily standups is a million-dollar question. The best daily standup practices are always open for discussion. Should you involve only one person? How many minutes should it last? Should you discuss current tasks or the common goal?
As you can see, virtual meetings incorporate many items to worry about. Though they can benefit your organization in various ways, every project manager must include ongoing projects and agile teams in the status meeting conversation.
Daily standups bring your entire team (in-house and remote teams) together in unified communication toward the beneficial development of events in your organization. They help handle every aspect of project management without disrupting daily workflows. With that in mind, let’s discuss the most effective ways to run daily standup meetings.
Top 10 tips for running a daily standup
Daily standups are perfect for agile project management and software development teams. These quick meetings last only a couple of minutes and help every team member share updates by answering standup questions regarding ongoing projects.
During these meetings, team members should provide a meaningful quick status update with insights into the following dedicated project-related aspects, including:
Yesterday’s accomplishments;
Ongoing activities for the day (daily updates);
Potential blockers that may prevent them from accomplishing their tasks and contributing to the project flow.
Since standups help agile teams handle daily tasks and remove blockers, these meetings are critical for successful project completion. Here are the best practices for successful standup meetings in your organization.
Meet early in the day ➡️ Set a fixed time
Run daily standups with consistency and commitment. The best practice is to run these meetings in the morning. Set a fixed, convenient meeting time for more effective standups and stick to it daily.
That will make it easy for your team members to participate and ensure everyone is on the same page. A daily standup should be a buffer for people, not a distraction that keeps them away from attending to critical tasks.
Importance of a daily standup leader
A daily standup meeting leader should be someone in a position with enough responsibility and experience to moderate the meeting and make it what it should be—a short but in-depth thread on daily goals and accomplishments.
This type of meeting isn’t suitable for in-depth technical discussions. It shouldn’t be a waste of time but a reflection on meaningful tasks. Each participant should provide a well-thought-out status update and state common pitfalls that may temper the team dynamic.
A project leader is commonly appointed to lead person standups, though that will depend on the type of agile framework you use. If you’re running a scrum team, the scrum master should be the meeting leader.
Team leaders commonly run standups in person or a video conference in other project management forms.
Make sure everyone participates ➡️ Go one-by-one
The key to running an effective standup is to make the most of the productive minutes on your hands. Since you have limited time, you must hold your team members accountable for participating.
That means the entire team should be present for every daily standup to avoid wasting time on bad meetings. The goal is to connect with your team and give each member a chance to voice their opinion.
If one teammate misses a daily briefing, they won’t hear if others can help address their problems. In addition, one-by-one or face-to-face is the best agile approach to daily standups.
It allows both meeting leaders and team members to connect mentally and physically. Face-to-face meetings also help foster a better sense of community and promote positive company culture.
Questions to ask in a daily standup
Daily standups help you address critical individual tasks with your core team. Such important matters should not be part of a side discussion. Instead, consider including essential standup questions in your daily standup meeting agenda that require immediate attention to find potential solutions as quickly as possible.
Remember, you’re there to assess task priority, not discuss the weather. The focus should be on the to-dos that need immediate execution and the persons in charge of it. Therefore, consider the most critical tasks and who will be handling them.
In addition to cornerstone questions, you can add a few alternative standup questions to discuss obstacles and roadblocks and present the best course of action.
Restrict updates from yesterday to today
All participants should stick to the yesterday-today-roadblocks format to keep their updates short, clean, and on point. That keeps the entire meeting brief and effective.
The cadence of daily standups
The best practice is to keep daily standups between 10–15 minutes. We recommend running a 15-minute standup every 24 hours. This consistent meeting cadence will create a sense of urgency and make your team more effective and productive. More importantly, it will speed up project velocity in your organization and help you gather up-to-date feedback.
How long should a daily standup be?
As mentioned earlier, keep your daily standups under 15 minutes.
Respect the time limit
Ensure that everyone respects the time limit to keep daily standups short and to the point. Each participant should present clear updates on yesterday’s activities, today’s tasks, and potential blockers that may interfere with their progress.
Everything requesting extended discussions is addressed after the daily standup
Action items that require longer than 15 minutes to address should be left for after the daily standup. Sometimes, technical limitations, dependencies, and cross-departmental blockers can get in the way and prevent your team from handling their responsibilities.
Label such issues as table-side conversations and address them after the daily standup meeting. Otherwise, you might turn a daily standup into a two-hour pointless meeting that gets you nowhere.
Use Ayanza to make daily standups more effective
Ayanza is a relatively new project management tool that supports various use cases, such as content creation, task management, team collaboration, and time orchestration. Think of Ayanza as a multi-channel app that empowers your team to handle everything from simple tasks to complex projects.
Ayanza can improve your daily standup efforts by providing separate channels where your teammates can break down large projects into smaller tasks, create any content necessary, brainstorm ideas, and tap into an up-to-date knowledge base.
You can streamline your work to save time using Ayanza’s daily standup meeting templates. These templates empower your meeting leaders to create a simple but effective daily standup routine that includes quick overviews of yesterday’s achievements and today’s responsibilities.
Thanks to these templates, you can plan your daily activities better, focus on task prioritization, understand priorities, and engage your team in constructive discussions. Ayanza gives you complete transparency over your team and the individual responsibilities of each member.
Getting started with Ayanza is as straightforward as possible. Simply run the Ayanza mobile app, fill in your daily standup, review received feedback from your teammates, leave comments, and schedule meetings according to your project requirements. There are many daily standup tools that you can use for that.
Another fantastic thing about Ayanza is that the app can help you prioritize tasks by urgency and present suggestions on the most effective ways to solve problems. Ayanza also gives you access to conversation history to review previous conversations and measure your progress.
With Ayanza, you can switch between different daily standup formats, such as daily kanban and asynchronous meetings, to better match your business needs.
If you need fresh content, Ayanza provides an AI-powered writer and access to AI prompt ideas to help you generate top-class content based on your requirements.
Conclusion
To make your daily standups more effective, you need the right strategy and the best tools to keep everything in line. These tips can help you make your standups more time-effective by prioritizing tasks and addressing issues that require immediate attention.
Focus on vital questions, pay attention to cadence, and set time limits to create a sense of urgency to which your team can relate. Use a project management solution like Ayanza to organize your meetings, manage a standup meeting schedule, and create a streamlined meeting routine for your participants.
FAQ
How can Ayanza help run daily standups?
Ayanza can help you streamline your daily standup meetings by providing suitable templates, AI functionalities, and collaborative spaces.
The Daily Prep template allows you to create the most convenient daily standup routine with a clear view of all current tasks and ongoing projects.
The Ayanza app aligns your teams and empowers them to keep all project-related conversations in one place, organize projects better, and improve your project management efforts.
How can I structure a daily standup?
The most effective daily standup format includes the following steps:
Short daily meetings – 10–15 is the time limit for daily standups.
Set a fixed meeting time – run your daily standups at the same time and place daily. This consistency helps you instill a sense of urgency in participants and maximize your limited time.
Everyone should attend – make sure every team member participates in daily standups. Keeping every teammate on the same page is paramount to avoid wasting time on discrepancies.
Run daily standups every 24 hours – avoid postponing daily meetings to stay up-to-date with the latest developments.
Ask the right questions – each daily standup should give you clear answers on past activities, daily tasks, and potential obstacles your team faces.
Who should conduct daily standups?
Project managers, scrum masters, and team leaders are the most suitable people for the meeting leader role.
When should I re-evaluate daily standups?
Consider re-evaluating your efforts if you can’t keep a daily standup under 15 minutes.