Still could just be a slack thread or a dashboard. Putting people in a room every day is simply wasteful, even if it "works okay". When I managed a team I hated them, but we did have a meeting each Friday afternoon to go over what we did well that week, so I guess you have to be tactical about when you pull everyone off task to huddle.

See, the previous MSP workplace I was at did one a week. If something was pressing the tech would inform the service manager, who would tap the correct resources to assist. The stand up was mostly just reviewing all service ticket requests and making sure nothing was falling through the cracks, so that if someone had a list of lower priority work but got slammed with something intense that took them away from their usual follow ups, those less important jobs could be reassigned to someone with the bandwidth to take them on. Also to ensure that any new tickets are being picked up in a timely fashion (not generally a problem, just doing a health check on it). Took ~1hr across all tickets and techs to review. Almost never longer, but frequently shorter.

It was a small team and we would continually keep in contact throughout the day by phone and slack. Nobody needed baby sitting, we were all professionals and adults.

I only left that position because the owner was cheap and continually denied raises. I didn't see a raise in ~4 years and decided to find something that paid better. I couldn't keep paying my bills with all the COVID inflation; I'd still be there if I was paid better.

There may be some scenarios where they are helpful, but I think it's possible to do it asynchronous in those situations.

If there's a critical issue that needs to be dealt with ASAP, there should be an escalation process.

You can have reoccurring (or ad hoc) meetings to discuss projects across teams. If the standup is a slack thread, any interested party could view it (based on channel permissions).

It shouldn't be on the individual members to bring up poor processes or that they're overworked in stand-ups. That should flow through their managers

Not trying to be difficult with my responses, just adding my insight from years in tech across a few different positions and companies. I am happy to hear that your team has a process that works!

It makes sense if you’re in an industry with hotspot flare-ups

Only if handled properly, which a lot of supposed "stand-ups" aren't.

I don't see how you can have a meeting with members of 3 different tiers of support where progress on multiple projects is summarized in a way that someone not on the projects can get anything meaningful out of it, in addition to tier 1 gets to talk about how swamped they are, and tier 2 gets to talk about the flow from tier 1 into some delicious sandwich, and have that only take 5 minutes. I'm guessing that's a minimum of 15 people in the meeting, if you have multiple tiers and everyone's present. To get things done in 5 minutes means that on average everyone only gets to talk for 24 seconds. If you have people who aren't talking, that suggests they don't need to be in the meeting.

In addition, the whole concept of "standing up" for a meeting is stupid. Sure, it means meetings don't last as long, but that's because it's uncomfortable. Plus there are social dynamics issues you introduce between tall people (often men) and short people (often women).

I think the length is what’s important. For a long time, my team’s stand ups were going 30-45 minutes and most of it felt pointless (or were discussions that should’ve been on smaller meetings). When I got control over them, I made sure they’re 20 minutes max and I’ll cut people off if they’re talking too long about something only a few people need to input on. Now no one has an issue with the stand up and it’s helped us catch stuff that might’ve been missed otherwise.

My experience is similar; the projects with daily stand-ups are well coordinated and people remain informed while projects without become chaotic and the people become clueless rapidly.

no one was reading it and we became desynchronized really quickly

This sounds like an issue with your team and not the process of having a thread approach. If people just ignored the daily standup meeting, like they did the thread, they would also become de-synchronized quickly.

That was our meeting before covid, but suddenly it became a 2-3 hours meeting every Monday morning. It's a nice way to drain your whole energy to start the week

Yeah, had a similar experience in a place I worked where people wrote in slack the things for the day. It was too much and too noise too and people would not read or care. It's too annoying and people felt disconnected anyway.

The important thing is really to have a strong arm and focus on the time. I think all the problems I ever had and they were solved in dailes was exactly because someone was enforcing time and not allowing others to say too much or derail the daily in useless details of their tasks or problems.

When I was a manager of a small team it was all junior guys. I had to hammer into their heads to message if they had trouble making progress.

A few times I got the feeling one of the guys was having issues (based on messages). So I called them up on Friday afternoon and they admitted they were way behind because they couldn't get past an issue. But they said "don't worry, I'll work through the weekend to get it done".

I told him "no, you're not working on the weekend. We'll connect on Monday morning and work through the problem together. Just let me know sooner next time so we can get you back on track quicker."

After a couple of those they got the message that it's ok to ask for help and isn't a sign of weakness and they're not gonna get fired for asking.

While I agree that a daily standup would help with this, I feel like there's other avenues to approach this problem. If their task is to do A -> C, give them some deadlines and if they don't meet them then become more involved. Have them check in with a senior on the problem. No need to drag the entire team into a standup because the juniors can't figure it out. You can also try to build a culture of asking for help, which is difficult to do. People either think they can figure it out eventually, or they're just slacking.

Yeah when I've managed more junior teams I didn't have an official morning meeting but I would make a point to do 3 rounds a day. One in the morning, one before lunch, and one before leaving. People could obviously ask questions any time but you'd be shocked at the number of 'well while you're here' questions you get that they never would have walked over with. Once they gained more experience half the time they wouldn't even take headphones out, just give a thumbs up. Cost me maybe an hour or two a day but def made the team more efficient

The whole point is to make the people on the team talk with each other "hey I’ll need to talk with you maybe after the daily because X"and that’s it.

Can't this be accomplished by people using your company's messaging system (hopefully not teams). You shouldn't have to have meetings to force collaboration.

I am all for being up to date with what your team is doing, but there is no way that every member of the team gives a meaningful update in every standup.

I think that there's too many tech jobs which are middle management whose job is to make it look like they're doing something while contributing nothing.

Just leave me alone and let me do my work!

Agreed! If you need me you know how to reach me.

there’s an upper and middle management brief where they outline all the work for the day, assign tasks to specific shops, give general information to be passed along (upcoming events and reminders), then I take that to my shop to assign individual tasks from our shop’s workload.

If this is the entire meeting, can't they just tell you this in an email, phone call, text message, etc and have you delegate it out to your shop?

I know most of my responses in this thread come across as I'm very anti-meetings, but I feel like if you're going to have a meeting, it needs to be beneficial to everyone. People have to take time out of their day, the meetings never start or end on time, and they generally could have just been an email. If you're just passing along information to specific teams, I don't think a meeting is necessary. There's better and more efficient ways to do things.

If your boss is checking in on you that much, that isn't a good sign.

At minimum, I would let your boss know before you do anything for the nephew because it is their job to say your priorities. Hell, you can even blame your boss for doing this. "I'm sorry, but my boss won't let me do that" is a great excuse which puts the responsibility on someone else.