Must the Stand-Up be Daily?

As an Accredited Kanban Trainer and coach, I work with teams every day who are evolving their understanding of Kanban as well as the level of maturity at which their teams practice it. One of the most frequent questions I hear from the teams with whom I work is:

Do daily stand-ups really need to happen every day?

It’s important to take into account the first principle of Kanban, Start with what you do now, when considering such a question.

The Kanban Method has recently identified an emerging set of cadences which the community is slowly beginning to adopt — but for most teams who are just getting started, they’ll likely continue to use the ceremonies to which their team is accustomed. For most teams, the daily stand-up, also referred to as the Kanban Meeting is a staple.

Why Almost Everyone Hates Stand-Ups

Many teams, even if they are not a Scrum team, use the format prescribed by Scrum for the daily stand-up. Each member of the team answers three questions:

1. What did I do yesterday?
2. What am I doing today?
3. Do I have any impediments?

Although routine can be great for teams trying to emerge from the gravitation pull of their old habits, the routine of the daily stand-up will eventually get old. As a result, the importance of the meeting and it’s goals diminish in the minds of each participant. The element of critical thinking that the ceremony is designed to pique often will backslide into a mindless, daily status update.

I must admit, the question at hand once frustrated me. I don’t fundamentally believe that 15 minutes is too much time to ask a team to be transparent every day. Once I began to understand why this question was emerging so frequently, the underlying motivation for the question became more clear to me. Most daily stand-ups are stale stand-ups and that’s why people hate them.

Ask Better Questions

Today, I make the case with teams who ask, “Do daily stand-ups really need to happen every day?” that they are asking the wrong question. I propose a new question:

Is our team mature enough to hold stand-ups less frequently?

Although I don’t ever recommend that a team eliminate stand-ups, my perspective has relaxed about the necessity of holding the meeting daily providing some criteria is met.

Here are the 10 goals I give to a team who wants hold stand-ups less frequently.

1. Each member of the team demonstrates systems thinking (the ability to consider how their work fits into the broader workflow of the team and overall organization).
2. Each member of the team updates the state of their work on the Kanban board in real-time.
3. All work the team is doing is represented on the Kanban board (no hidden work).
4. The team regularly uses an Aging WIP chart to identify and take action on stale cards.
5. The team detects, discusses, and resolves flow issues with their work throughout the day without prompting.
6. Each team member knows the current lead time distribution metric from memory.
7. Expedite and Abort rates are low.
8. Each member of the team is adhering to Pull Criteria and other explicit policies.
9. The stand-up isn’t being led by a specific person but is organically driven by the team.
10. Stakeholders are generally satisfied with the team.

Try it with Your Team

It’s important to remember that meeting these criteria isn’t a finish line. It’s not about meeting the goal, changing the policy on how frequently your team conducts a stand-up meeting, and never holding your team accountable again. Your team should review these criteria a minimum of once per month to ensure they remain aligned.

If after you reduce the frequency of stand-ups you observe that your team is falling short, re-institute the daily stand-up until you are consistently meeting or exceeding these 10 goals.