5 Ways Effective Teams Run Daily Slack Standups
The massive popularity of Slack has turned daily Slack standup meetings into a must for teams who use the tool as their primary synchronous or asynchronous communication platform. It sounds easy enough, everyone gets on and updates Slack once a day to let the team know what they are working on. But, if you’ve done this for a […]
Daily Scrum: The Tools, Methods, and Tips To Pull Them Off Successfully
Wondering how to hold your daily scrum? What tool should you use? What method should you follow? There are a lot of options on the market; from email and messaging to video, and in-person meetings. Along with these options, you can find tools that are free, paid, or used for other needs in your business. […]
The Biggest Time Wasters in Standup Meetings
I’ve been in some pretty lame standup meetings in my day. When I think back to what made them so ineffective, I can see one common denominator—wasting time. That’s really what most things come down to, isn’t it? “Am I gaining any value by being here?” If the answer is yes, we stay. If the […]
3 Slack Tips To Strengthen Team Communication
Gone are the days when you come back to work after a week-long vacation only to find your email’s inbox blown up. Fast forward to now; you log in to your Slack account, and you have dozens of @ mentions, thread replies, and private messages to catch up on. Slack replaced email because of its […]
An Abridged History of Scrum Standups and Agile Project Management
Have you ever wondered where daily scrum standups started? Or why yours are starting to feel more like mindless meetings than productivity-boosters? In this post you’ll get a short history of the daily standup trend—and how to make standups more effective for your team. Today’s standups can be traced back to World War I. Military […]
How to Work Effectively with Daily Standups
Do you ever feel like everyone’s flying solo? One team member announces she’s launching into Project C while everyone else is still fine-tuning Project A. No one really knows what John is up to and Pete is still finalizing the reports you were anticipating three weeks ago. Make Daily Standups Effective If you spend more […]
How to Use Slack Integrations to Replace Mindless Meetings
Businesses everywhere are working toward eliminating “unproductivity tools” and outdated methods of communication. Endless email chains and mindless meetings are out. All-in-one apps are in. For many growing companies and remote teams, that means two-year-old Slack is playing a major role in day-to-day communications and collaborations. This group chat app has become essential to many […]
Are Online Daily Standups Right for Your Team?
I once worked at a company that desperately wanted to be on the cutting edge of creative culture. The strategy for getting everyone on board involved a regular cadence of mandatory meetings. There were meetings to see who could come up with the next “big idea,” lunch meetings to swap “in-the-field” stories and “super fun […]
Leadership Team Development: How to Get Your Team Back on Track
Leadership team development is hard. When I first started leading the team at Formstack, there was no question as to where we’d all be working: In the office. Every weekday. All day. Then, one week we decided to crack the door of our completely office-based environment and peer into the hallways of remote work. If […]
Making Daily Mtg SMART
My daily mtg were terrible. The format was generally the same — we’d go around the room, with each person telling me what they were working on. Bodie* would rattle off about a dozen things each time, no task too small to describe in detail. Wallace would find creative ways to mention the same task […]