Most effective way to do daily standup meeting when a few people are remote
- by Burhan Ali
I am a software developer in a small team of seven. We are not an Agile (with a big 'A') team but are experimenting with some aspects of agile. One of these is the daily "standup" meeting. The difficulty here is that for two days of the week we have at least one person working from home so the full team isn't available in the same room. What is the best way to carry out a daily standup in this situation?
Some facts that may be relevant:
We all work in a single open plan room.
We use Skype in our company.
We don't have any video conferencing capability.
We all work the same hours so there are no timezone complexities involved.
The development manager is one of the people who works from home one day a week.
Things we have tried:
Conference call using Skype: This is tricky for those in the office because you can hear people speak in the room and then a split second later through the headset. This can e very distracting.
Conference phone: Awful experience. Hard to get them to work and poor quality audio.
Text-based updates using Skype. This is not as engaging and is no different than just firing off a status email in the morning.
I have seen other questions about remote collaboration but they are mainly about completely remote teams and/or teams that span multiple time zones. We are not affected by either of these problems.
What can we do to make our standup meetings better in these circumstances?
