…but does everyone love listening?
Agile loves talking:
The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
— The Agile Manifesto
…but talking is expensive. It doesn’t scale. And with the reality of global development teams, shifting time zones and hybrid and remote work environments, it’s more often not realistic or efficient or even possible.
Let’s deconstruct the standard daily stand-up script and its intention one by one:
1. What did you do yesterday?
This question helps the team understand what progress was made and what has been accomplished.
Why would this not be in Jira? It’s amazing how often the Jira hygiene does not actually reflect the reality of what people are doing, and the daily standup makes this sloppiness harder to see. The less Jira reflects reality, the more dependent you become on synchronous meetings to know what is happening. The less Jira encodes reality, the easier it is to stop thinking about what you could do if it did.
How often is the answer to this question relevant to everyone in the meeting? When it is not, what is the opportunity cost of their time spent receiving useless data?
2. What will you do today?
This question focuses the team's attention on the tasks and goals for the current day.
It ensures everyone is aligned and working towards the same objectives.
Again, why would this not be in Jira?
Again, how often is the answer to this question relevant to everyone in the meeting?
If alignment has to be maintained as a group in a synchronous meeting on a daily basis, there is no planning or execution discipline or overarching vision empowering the team.
3. Are there any impediments or blockers?
Identifying obstacles early allows the team to address them promptly, preventing delays.
The number of times a person hits a surprise blocker is directly proportional to the amount of time spent identifying dependencies during planning. A full-team meeting to cover for this is an incredibly expensive way to operate.
And the number of times an entire development team is required to resolve a blocker should be close to zero.
The bottom line is that this reliance on extremely expensive synchronous status sharing is an anachronism from the technology and ways of working we had when Agile was first established. It is time to modernize.
The Agile Projector creates Coordination Liquidity – like liquidity in a market, it makes it easier for coordination to flow without everyone needing to be present at the same time. Instead of people syncing in real time, the data that matters is captured in fit-for-purpose tooling, made available on-demand to the people and systems who need it, when they need it.
Investing in tools that support decentralized, asynchronous coordination inverts the meeting bottleneck and unlocks exponential scaling.
The Agile Projector transforms coordination into a data problem, not a scheduling one. Developers indicate effort days and dependencies and Issue status in Jira simply as a part of doing their daily work, and the project manager uses The Agile Projector to maintain that information as optimized, personalized backlogs.
This same information is scaled across the company in the form of priority alignment, execution status, and collaborative response to change early and often.
And we can save our meeting time for those things that tooling cannot solve.
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