My worst stand-up(s)

Reading this story about the worst daily scrum ever made me think about my own experience. An both actually reminds me of what happened in the linked story.

 

First I remember a team I was on where stand-ups occurred in different conference rooms each day. Hence no access to a team scrum board, always late because we had to throw the people meeting in the room before us out. Also since it was a conference room it was really hard to get people to actually stand up around a table full of chairs. Content was also more like reporting progress to the scrum master than exchanging information between the team members. What happened instead was that as team members were walking back to their desks they talked to each other and resolved some problems in the way back after the stand-up. Obviously the scrum master never knew...

 

I also remembered this huge stand-up. It was really three teams working on totally different things that met for a huge stand-up where there was a mostly just "reporting to the scrum master" but also two thirds of the people speaking had nothing to do with your own work. In this case my team started having a second stand-up right after the official stand-up. This time in a room with our own task board. Soon other teams heard about this and started to do the same thing. Soon after that the huge stand-up was canceled and each team just did their own stand-up.

 

So what is the lesson here? Good people will do the right thing regardless of what process is pushed onto them. So why waste their time on something that is not valuble to them?