Diary part 2 – The distributed daily meeting
Given the distributed nature of the teams and the limited amount of daily team communication, I have decided that it would be most beneficial to get the daily meetings started as soon as possible.
Out of all the practices it is the one that I like the most, as it moves the team away from the computer and to start talking to each other often.
I want the group to feel like a team moving towards a goal (even though the goal or goals are not yet clear to me). However, we have many groups working on different projects.
As far as I have seen moving to working in an agile way takes time to do it right and can be frustrating for those changing, so I don’t want to push everything at everyone upfront. On previous projects it just causes rejection.
So my plan is to take one team and start with the daily meetings, who can then see the value of the meeting and then help me to move the rest along as well.
Luckily the team of 5 have agreed to be available at 9.15am. This is perfect! I find that a meeting in the morning is the best possible time as it sets everyone up for the day and issues can be discovered as soon as possible. To be honest I have never tried an afternoon daily meeting. But on a previous project we had meetings a bit later on and this did feel like it was easier to focus not on the project but on emails and browsing until the daily meeting starts.
The next problem is that the team are distributed and working part-time. I would love for us to be co-located as it is the optimum way to work but it is not possible at the moment. So what is the best tool to use?
We first tried dimdim. And I have to say that it didn’t work for us. The joint whiteboard was just painful and added no value, and the video was poor and so was the voice quality. This was the web version, rather than a locally installed version, but I don’t really have time for managing a service like that.
The next choice was Skype which for me seemed to be the first choice as a communication tool. It works, is free and can do conference calls, and chat combined.
A week later…
So we have been having daily meetings for over a week, the first few days using chat as people had problems with the audio or mic. I found this to be terribly slow and the meeting ran to 35-40 mins. However on one day we had all members actually using Skype as a conference call and the meeting lasted 15 minutes, which is the ideal length otherwise people start to question the value of the meeting. You really notice the difference when the meetings are 15 minutes.
To keep to this time it requires some discipline. With all teams that I have worked with, it is difficult to get people to stay on track, to not get pulled into longer discussions or tangents. I find with the daily meeting that someone has to take that role and keep a list of discussion points for people to talk about after. It seems that half the time, that the discussion wasn’t that important anyway, and at least the people that are not concerned about that issue can get to work. In fact, you can hear this inaudible sigh of relief when a discussion is pushed to after the daily meeting. It seems no-one will say it out of politeness, so someone has to take that responsibility.
We have been having lots of problems with the audio on Skype though and this is causing the meetings to take long and causing frustration, which needs to be addressed, as I don’t want people to not turn up to the daily meetings.
For people that cannot attend I have been using a google spreadsheet that they must fill in before the meeting. It just has the 3 questions and the person’s name and it avoids people having to send emails around. Which seems to be working for now and is easy to setup.
