Five benefits of Daily Standups

Five benefits of Daily Stand-up Meetings

1. Communication: As you know already, there are so many benefits of communication to a team. However, as one of our eight agile principles, we understand at the Consortium that poor communication can be the single biggest cause of project failure. Techniques, such as daily stand-ups, are built in to the agile methodology to help teams be able to achieve these principles. Business agility is all about maximising the opportunity for face-to-face contact. As a people focused mindset, integrating this behaviour in to your teams’ culture is an ideal way to start becoming a more agile organisation.
2. Transparency: Similar to communication, daily stand-ups help all team members get the chance to share their work with everyone, clearly identifying roles and responsibilities as well as helping to prevent silos. Including cross-functional team members in daily stand-ups, as much as possible, is desired to achieve full transparency within the organisation. It is important within organisations wanting to become more agile, that senior leadership teams embrace the need for this technique, as well as others, and empower staff to experiment with this to see the benefits of such behaviours. If they can get involved with the daily stand-ups, even better!
3. Trust: Through creating better communication and more transparency within the team, trust will start to build as an outcome of frequent daily stand-ups. With a joint understanding of roles, responsibilities, work objectives and an agreed business outcome, teams can start to see a stronger sense of trust among colleagues building from these short, yet impactful, get-togethers.
4. Exposing issues: Sometimes, it is not until coming together as a team and talking through varied tasks that certain obstacles may come in to view. This can be helpful in the team understanding how particular tasks affect all of those in the organisation, no matter what department. There is no blame-game in business agility and this is where the phrase “good spot” comes in to play! Business agility is about embracing change and daily stand-ups are a great place to begin the discussion on how this can happen when obstacles arise (however remembering to take any detailed conversations offline).
5. T-E-A-M: With busy work schedules, sometimes getting the opportunity to stand together for fifteen minutes at the beginning of the day is the only chance you may get to do so as a whole team. Before you know it, people are in meetings, on business calls or off on work trips! Standing together for a small part of each day can really help to start empowering your colleagues as a team and to remind themselves of how we are all there to support one another. Whatever your business objective may be, you are all there to deliver the same outcome and your daily stand-up is your friendly daily reminder of achieving this.