We have a daily “standup” meeting where each person in the team says what they did yesterday and what they are going to do today. You can also highlight any “blockers” that will prevent you from completing your work.
Since we are all working remotely, we just do them using Microsoft Teams. At first we just nominated someone to speak next, but since we have around 10 people in the team, and people don’t really listen or pay attention, then we ended up with people asking: “has everyone been?” – when only half of the team has been.
When Microsoft Teams introduced the “Raise Hand” feature, we used it as a flag to show who still needs to talk. Still, Colin says “who is next? Matt have you been?”. Yes he has been, why don’t you choose one of the 6 people with their hands raised?
Another point which illustrates that people don’t listen, is when I say something like “I’ve sent a Pull Request for my work but no one has reviewed it yet, can someone review it?”. Then three hours later, no one has reviewed it.
I think the problem is often that people are so focussed on what they have to say, then they don’t listen. I was watching a video about it and the guy reckoned the “walking the board” method gains more attention. This method is where you look at your “Kanban board” which shows you all the work your team is doing. Then you can go through each item in turn, and the relevant people can then speak up. I still think you’ll have the same problem since you know that you will have to speak when it gets to your work.
There are a couple of people that seemed to nominate people without even looking at the attendees, so then they end up in embarrassing situations where they say “Rob can go next”, but Rob isn’t actually on the call. Sometimes it was well-known that they don’t actually work that day because they are part time.
We also have someone in our team that just deals with Test Environments so isn’t directly involved in our work. We did raise the point that it is stupid for him to attend the stand-up meetings but our manager said he wants it to continue so he feels part of the team and also gets to hear the team talk. I guess that is a good point – since we are at home, we don’t get to hear our colleagues speak much.
His updates are so boring, and he delivers them in a really bored tone. I often think he doesn’t have much work to do, so just says words to blag it:
- had to restart some servers, and upgrade some RAM.
- signed off some policies, and am looking at patching some security vulnerabilities.
- I sat down with Dan for a bit and went through some tickets. Got some other tickets. Need to review some policies. Still need to complete some security vulnerability patches.
- Busy doing environment stuff, mainly security updates which I’ve almost finished. Just need to do some Virtual Machines today. There’s about 40-50 clients so that’s going to take the full day, maybe tomorrow as well.
- Catching up on comms, am currently resetting a password, and then gonna look at some more environment tickets.
How long does resetting a password take? Is any of that actually useful to the team anyway? He may as well just say “Environments stuff” then choose the next person.
Another thing that always happens is when you pick someone to go next and you are met with silence. So you say “you are on mute!”, then a few seconds later “oh yeah, sorry I was on mute”. Here are some classic “mute” scenarios that I wrote down:
Becky: “Good morning Colin”
*few seconds of silence*
Colin: *bland tone* “good morning”
Becky: “You sound down, Colin”
Colin: “I said ‘good morning’ but I was on mute, so that's my second attempt.”
James: "Can everyone see my screen ok?"
*silence*
Becky: "yeah, sorry I was on mute"
Colin: "yeah, sorry I was on mute"
Matt: "yeah, sorry I was on mute"
Matt: "Colin, have you been?"
*silence*
Matt: "You still have your hand up"
*silence*
Matt: "you are also on mute"
*silence*
Colin: "I'm on mute? how did that happen?
And a bonus scenario:
Becky: "this meeting has started early!"
Colin: "who started it?"
Matt: "it was you Colin"
Stranger Coding Tings 