This is a picture of a standup meeting on a large project at Corbis. Today I counted 41 attendees. The attendance has averaged 39 or 40 every day for 6 weeks. Daniel Vacanti can be seen far-left leading the meeting. The kanban board is behind him out of shot. [Not everyone is standing as some are sitting at their actual desks in the communal work area. This meeting happens every day at 9.30am. It's generally over within ten minutes.

Corey Ladas has blogged about how the Lean Kanban process scales differently and how a standup can be effective with very large numbers of people. The key is that we don't enumerate through the people asking them what they have done and will do and whether they are blocked. We enumerate through the kanban cards on the board and discuss whether work if flowing and what if anything is blocking it.

This project has 6 dev leads and 6 dev teams working concurrently. If this were a scrum project we'd have 6 independent scrums followed by a scrum-of-scrums with only the leads (assuming the lead is playing the scrummaster role.)

I see pros and cons to the big meeting. It is efficient. It gets the whole team together, not just the sub-teams. But it clearly isn't as personal. And the claimed peer-pressure aspect of a scrum standup meeting is missing.

What we are finding is that some of the dev teams hold a brief huddle afterwards for just their own team. This is entirely optional, doesn't happen every day and doesn't (generally) happen in front of the kanban board - more a design coordination meeting than a project tracking meeting.

Is anyone else running standup meeting with larger than the recommended scrum size of 6 to 12? What are your results? What's the largest effective standup meeting you've been a part of?

Photography: courtesy Laurence Cohen
Related Post: Lean Scales Differently than Agile, Corey Ladas Lean Scales Differently than Agile Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Scrum, David+Anderson, Corey+Ladas