Standup Time Boxed By Lunch
Typically daily Scrums are held as early in the morning as reasonable or later in the afternoon. Due to some strange circumstances the intranet portal project I’m Scrum Master on has a daily Scrum at 11:15, right before lunch. At our retrospective early this week I asked if we should move it to another time or at least to say 11:00. The universal response was no, don’t move it.
The reasoning across the team was that by having it right before lunch it forced the meeting to fit into the 15 minute window and it cut down on the number of followup meetings held just after the Scrum. They liked having that added pressure to get the meeting done before running off to lunch. Strange, but it’s up the team to self-organize.
Ed Gibbs @ June 29, 2006
looks like some people in your team like tight schedules
Reminds me about the reasoning behind Scott Adams OA5 approach: because we have to leave on time we are forced to be efficient.
Ahh, OA5, Out At 5.
I’m tempted to say something about a boxed lunch, but I’ll refrain.
I can no longer remember where I read it, but I actually heard about someone explaining that stand-ups should be around lunch because that way people got things done in the morning.
A developer comes in at say 8am and the standup is at 9am. Since they know there’s an interruption coming in an hour they tend to just do email or other admin stuff until the standup. If the standup is at 11:30 they know they’re breaking for lunch anyway so they work hard for say 3.5 hours and then break for the standup and go to lunch. More productive that way.