WHY the same place and time for your daily stand-up?

“we’re all here, let’s just have stand-up now”
“so-and-so isn’t coming today, so let’s have stand-up now”
“hey, I’ll just come over there and we’ll do stand-up there”

It seems so easy and innocent to simply change the time and place of stand-ups, especially when key people such as the PO or Scrum master may not be attending the meeting for the day. The reasons I recommend for not changing are:

Habit

The need for good habits is possibly the most obvious reason for not changing the time and place of your daily stand-up. If the daily stand-up becomes a habit it will be ingrained into the psyche of your team and the operation of the stand-up becomes something that individual team members provide, rather than an action that is demanded of them. By making stand-up a habit, you have left them with extra creative juices to use in more mentally demanding tasks, like design or architecture.

There’s a reason why Steve Jobs used to wear the same clothes everyday, it’s because it was a habit he had developed. He did not need to use will power or creative juices to make a decision on what to wear, meaning he used these mental resources later on in the day for more important things.

Rings alarm bells for more ingrained problems

The daily stand-up should not be a status update for any particular individual, but this may become the case if its timing is continually changed due to an individual’s absence. Instead of a status update, the daily stand-up should be an opportunity for the team to re-gather and plan their day in order to achieve a previously committed goal.

Team building

There’s a lot to say about a team who consistently – day in and day out – has a stand-up. If the habit of a daily stand-up develops within a team, it has done so because the team itself has found the stand-up rewarding. If the stand-up is rewarding, it means the team is delivering. In addition, a simple ‘good morning’, ‘how are you?’ or ‘how was your weekend’ from just one person in the team can strengthen an individual’s morale who may be having a hard time at home, or that just has many things on his or her mind. An individual who knows that he or she  will be greeted politely at a set time, would probably sub-consciously be prepared for the kind words received at such a meeting.