Providing your status is part of every workplace.  Even if you work alone, your decision as to whether you should take your own status periodically, perhaps in a journal, is still a decision about giving status.  You have a status, whether you give one to yourself or not.

Agile methodologies introduced the world to the scrum, a meeting often called a standup because it is expected that the attendees — meant to be fewer than a dozen, and more like a half dozen — should each speak for a minute about their status.  When these meetings are run well, they end swiftly.  If the scrum master decides that, on regular basis, the meeting should run to an hour while one of the engineers’ problems is discussed, the attendees can swiftly come to resent it.  I don’t think this potential for abuse is specific to software engineering either.

There are plenty of other situations where giving status is fraught with peril though.  A lot of bosses get status during weekly one-on-one meetings.  Still more bosses pretend they are having weekly one-on-one meetings.  The funny thing is that the bosses that consistently take an hour of your time every week are the ones you wish wouldn’t, while the ones unavailable are the ones with which you really want to talk.

I can’t hide my shock when someone at work asks, “What have you gotten done for the last few weeks?” Human psychology is simple in this case.  Almost everybody will begin carefully combing their records for examples of work getting done.  If you ask them to give you their status in a minute, they’ll take two; in five minutes, they’ll take ten.  “What have you done for me?” isn’t an invitation to know what someone is doing.  It’s an invitation for them to justify the amount of money the company is paying them.

But some managers ask for status in this fashion all the time.  Worse, they turn it into a “standup” that lasts two hours while a large, loosely related group of workers take their turn giving status.

The funny thing is that if you ask someone, “Hey, what have you been up to lately?” they’re likely to give you a short, informative answer.  I think the problem is with time.  The Agile standup is effectively asking something like, “what have you been up to lately?” which, since it covers a single work day, doesn’t really require the justification of one’s pay (though, by experience, some scrum team members will still see it this way).   Agile has figured something out that project managers everywhere are still ignoring.

Still, you can’t expect to get away with giving status in standups alone.  What are some productive ways that just might work?

  • Allow an individual to journal his status on a blog or a wiki.  As long as he keeps it up-to-date, it becomes an asynchronous way of letting people know his status.  Remind him with software to regularly post updates.
  • Designate a “status proxy” ahead of a meeting, and have her collect the status of all the participants asynchronously before the call.  During the call, let the “status proxy” do all the speaking, leaving time for questions to the individuals when she is done.  Change the “status proxy” with each meeting.  This eliminates the significant overhead of each individual “standing up” and “sitting down” during the call, an amount of time I have found to be extraordinary.
  • Ask each “status proxy” to journal what they learned as part of presenting.
  • Have a simple form for individuals to fill out with questions about their status.  Make form responses visible to all individuals.
  • If  you must have an “all hands on deck” type call where anybody and everybody should speak, start the call with a prioritization discussion.  Who should go first?  It’s generally easy and fast to do this.  Then, if you run out of time, you’ve covered the most important topics.

If a “status proxy” does all the talking, will the individuals be listening?  Were they listening with the old, “everybody talks” model?  The “status proxy” means a shorter, more focused meeting.  People are more likely to stay involved, and nobody is concerned they’ll be caught on mute when someone calls out for them.

I have David Allen’s book Getting Things Done on my desk.  Maybe that means that, sometime soon, I will be.