They’re coming thick and fast – another Agendashift release this morning…
Today’s release saw the removal of the term “standup meeting” from our assessment tools. That’s despite this glowing reference to the practice in my book:
If there’s one Agile practice I recommend above all others, it’s this one. I’ve seen teams drop standup meetings when their value goes unrecognized, only to reinstate them just a few days or weeks later as things start to fall apart. Perhaps the very familiarity of the practice makes its value too easy to overlook.
Have I changed my mind? No!
Here’s the old wording of the prompt:
We review our progress frequently, typically during daily standup meetings
And the new:
We share progress on our work frequently and are quick to collaborate as the need or opportunity arises
The old wording stood out as one of the most prescriptive of our 40+ prompts. This matters because:
- Strong responses might hide dysfunction – for example ritualistic meetings that are achieving little
- Weak responses might not seem important – “OK, we’re not doing the practice, but so what?” or “We tried that once, and it didn’t work!”
Strong answers to the new wording are more likely to reflect not just an effective practice, but good outcomes in the form of timely collaboration. Weak answers will highlight not the absence of a solution, but the presence of a genuine problem, one that probably ought to be addressed. That’s how all our prompts are meant to work – neither prescriptive nor judgemental but thought-provoking and action-inducing where it matters.
Thank you to Thorbjørn Sigberg, Andrea Chiou and Karl Scotland for valuable help in iterating on that prompt in our Slack community yesterday. Ping me if you’d like an invite.
Do you think you could make effective use of tools like these? The Agendashift partner programme is now open, in a pre-launch phase before we announce our first wave of partners next month.
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