The 16 Rules of DMAIC

07/24/2022:

This multi-part article is the first in a series of five serialized parts that explores why all businesses, all organizations, and all enterprises should consider daily standups as an integral part of their overall project and operational communication planning.

Despite the adoption of the Agile framework globally, having a daily standup seems to have been thrown to the side as a waste of everyone’s time. This article asserts the contrary, that maintaining a disciplined daily standup regimen is absolutely necessary from a communication and conflict resolution perspective.

It explores eleven common reasons why projects - and by extension, daily operations - fail, and how daily stand-ups are a necessary first step to achieving overall outcome success.

Eleven Good Reasons for Daily Standups - Part 1

The Daily Standup

Having a daily standup -- or its virtual equivalent -- is a vital and productive way to start everyone’s workday. Whatever framework or business process model your organization has implemented; whether you are technically savvy or not; whether you are a manager or not, whether you work in a small business or a multi-national conglomerate; whether you are working on-site or remotely, a daily standup is a necessary trigger to the efficient and effective communication that human cooperative action demands.

Simply put, a standup meeting is nothing more than a short, time-constrained team status check -- by tradition and realistic professional experience, limited to no more than 10-15 minutes, start to finish -- usually scheduled early each workday.

Only four categories of information are discussed; brevity and conciseness are emphasized. When relevant, the team lead may be obliged to alert members to any general events, leadership issues, or policy directives that impact the entire team. This is followed by a brief and concise report by individual team members on, 1) what tasks the worker accomplished the previous workday; 2). what tasks the worker plans to accomplish today; 3). any issues or constraints that are preventing these tasks or operational responsibilities from moving forward as planned for some iterative goal.

All mumbo-jumbo aside, it is a short, all-hands, daily team briefing.

Any other issues raised during the daily standup should be noted as a side-bar action item that can be discussed separately by the appropriate team members, and any necessary support personnel, or stakeholders.

Operationally, the point is to account for the whereabouts of everyone on the team, to quickly give everyone on the functional or project team situational awareness of the team’s activities: which tasks are being worked on, their relative progress, and what problems or constraints are impacting task progress. Once minimal situational awareness has been accomplished, the team members are free to continue to work on their assigned tasks.

In a very short period of time, a lot has been accomplished. A lot has been communicated.

Looking back, it is clear to me that my own practice of holding daily standup meetings derives from my experience as a young Fleet Sailor in the United States Navy. Each morning -- on whichever ship I was serving-the “OI” (Operations and Information) Division assembled together at, “Quarters for Muster, Instruction and Inspection”, abbreviated to “morning quarters”, or more simply ”quarters”.

To say that this practice is not normally implemented in the civilian world is an understatement. And that is a shame.

From a management and leadership perspective -- when done correctly and consistently -- a daily standup meeting is the single most efficient and effective communication technique in the management bag of tricks. It is the single most efficient and effective communication technique in the leadership bag of tricks. It is the single most efficient and effective method for organizing quick team response to fast-moving, changing circumstances. It is the foundation for developing team cohesiveness and performance metrics. It is the foundation for developing dispute resolution and Win-Win negotiation skill sets.

Unfortunately, you will find no specific reference to such a technique anywhere in the Project Management Institute’s Project Book of Knowledge (PMBOK)…With the exception of Agile, you will find no specific reference to such a technique in any other process framework or business process model…You will find no specific reference to such a technique in any Masters of Business Administration curricula…You will find no specific reference to such a technique in any Organizational Policy or Employee Handbook.

For the vast portion of my now five decades of professional life -- with some notably delightful exceptions -- I have experienced a plethora of poor managers…and even poorer leaders. These have been occasionally punctuated by absolute nightmare frontline supervisors and mid-level managers who seemed to have verged on the edge of sociopathic.

Wherever I am managing or leading a team, I make sure that a daily standup is held. Whenever I am in support, where no daily standup exists, I make sure, in some way, to alert my Direct Report of my whereabouts, what I accomplished the previous work day, what I am working on today, and any constraints I am facing. I keep track of my daily activities, whether the submission of a weekly report is required or not, to aid both my own memory and to act as a contemporaneous historical reference.

In part this is just simple prudence; letting your boss know what you are doing before she asks you where you have been, after a half-hour spent trying to chase you down on some five-alarm fire that has just landed on her desk, can earn your trust and save you heaps of heartaches. A customer asking for an accounting of a series of inter-connected events that occurred several weeks in the past go more smoothly if it doesn’t require several hours of intense historical reconstruction.

But to a greater degree, it is one of the ways I try to “manage up”. My hope is that by providing these few bits of daily information, I will provide an example…perhaps even to successfully plant a small seed.

While there is nothing you can do with sociopaths other than to remove yourself from the situation as quickly as possible. I believe that those communication skills commonly referred to as “soft skills”, are the keys to both management and leadership success. I believe they can be passed on to those who are able and willing to listen. If I am lucky, perhaps some will improve upon them; perhaps, too, they will pass these skills on to the next generation.

Many of these skills were passed onto me by those few exceptional managers and leaders who took the time to mentor me, and the much greater number of the others who simply failed to “toe the mark” in comparison. After decades of cumulative, random examples, I am satisfied that the missing variables that distinguish the former from the latter fall into two areas: 1). the ability to communicate efficiently and effectively, and 2). the ability to identify and successfully resolve internal and external conflicts.

Efficient and effective communication is the ability to send information, verify its receipt by the intended recipient, and validation that the recipient actually understands the intent and context of that information. The sender does not know if the information has been received until its successful delivery is acknowledged by the recipient. The sender does not know if the communication is understood until some form of recipient validation is received by the sender, often in the form of some subsequent corroborating action or behavior.

Identifying and successfully resolving internal and external conflicts is the ability to use those communication skills to produce Win-Win (Fischer & Ury, 1991) outcomes when interpersonal, role, and power issues and conflicts impede project and operational success.

It is these skills that are most important to project and operational success, and the least addressed in the overall business and IT community. The purpose of this article is to redress this oversight, and -- hopefully -- to narrow an overly broad discussion to these two variables that matter most.

(Continue to Part 2)

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