Corey Ladas posts his thoughts on how a kanban development team daily standup operates differently than a Scrum team standup and why it scales to a larger number of people and can still finish in 15 minutes (and most usually much less).
Corey and I have been talking about this phenomena for a while. The standup meetings on my team last 5 to 10 minutes typically but often involve 20 or more people. For example, our sustaining work processing change requests across any of our diverse IT systems attracts analysts, developers, testers, build engineers, project managers, functional managers and business owners. It's common to see 20+ people at the standup at 9.45am every morning. On one of our major projects, as Corey mentions, up to 40 people attend the standup meeting because the kanban board is showing work-in-process that interests them or that they are directly responsible for. Despite these large numbers of attendees the meetings are over in as little as 10 minutes. How is that possible?
The main difference is that with a kanban system, the team enumerates over the work-in-process kanban cards, orchestrated by the functional manager leading the meeting. Most of the WIP doesn't need comment. As Corey says, only the special cause variations, i.e. project issues, generally need comment. And when comments are needed only 1 or 2 people need speak. The whole team manages to keep up with what is going on by simply observing the kanban board and listening to the updates on issues blocking flow.
With one of our major projects, we are running feature squads (a slight variant on an FDD Feature Team or a Microsoft Feature Crew.) In a Scrum style process, each of these teams would hold there own scrum (daily standup) and would send a representative to the scrum of scrums to update the whole project. With our kanban system we are able to do all of this with just one sub-15 minute meeting with everyone present - a flat structure, no hierarchy, no additional overhead. Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Corey+Ladas
