The daily update

A tool to increase visibility, accountability and efficiency

When working remotely, communication can be a bottle neck. You miss out on all the out-of-band conversations, the proverbial water-cooler talk. Daily, synchronous stand up meetings don’t work because they easily bloat and they interrupt everyone’s flow. A stand up should last 5 to 10 minutes. However, they often go well over 20 to 30 minutes. Instead, create a daily updates channel where people post a concise update of 3 to 10 lines every day. The update should minimally include:

• Any wins? Have you completed something, or reached a milestone?
• What’s your plan for today? What are you currently focusing on?
• Is anything blocking you? Do you need anything? From whom?

The daily update is lightweight and easy to adopt. It takes 2-5 minutes to complete. That’s less than 30 minutes per week! It also generates a log of what everyone is focusing on creating visibility into the work being done. It catalyzes coordination and makes the team more efficient by bringing focus to friction points.

Here is an example of a daily update:

Antoine

Good morning guys! ☕

Yesterday,

• I finished setting up and configuring prettier in the repo. (<jira ticket>)

Today,

• I want to setup a git hook to run the formatting before any push upstream. (<jira ticket>).
• I am meeting with @Alice to discuss our E2E testing strategy.

Blockers,

• I have a unit tests that keep timing out and I can’t figure out why. @Bob, I believe you implemented these last month. Would you have 10 minutes today to explain the setup to me?

It is short and to the point. It gives everyone a clear idea of the current situation by highlighting progress, work in progress, and blockers. It also acts as a clear channel for coordination and therefore reduces interruption. Coordination and collaboration is planned instead of reactive and disruptive. You will never completely eliminate the need for reactive work. However, interruptions and context switching carry an important overhead and reducing it goes a long way towards increasing your software delivery throughput.

In closing, the daily update promotes visibility and accountability. It incentivizes tangible, demonstrable progress and helps reduce interruptions. Also, as opposed to synchronous stand ups, it is not subject to bloating, especially in a remote or hybrid setting. It is so easy to implement that I believe it should be a no-brainer for most teams.