You may, or may not have noticed, but we publish a blog at least once per month. Since we started writing blogs in the team, I don’t think we have ever forgotten to produce one. We don’t have someone in our team with an elephant’s memory – it is simply that we discuss it every week.
We have blogged several times about our Daily Stand Up (DSU) meetings and over the last year, we talked about how they have evolved over the time we have been running them. Our Agenda dictates our discussion each day. When we started with our paper agenda, it was the same items every day. Now that we use SharePoint and Power BI, we can tailor our agenda to discuss different things on different days. We have our core topics that we discuss every day, but there are things we discuss once a week on different days, for example, blogs on a Tuesday, the resource plan for next week on a Friday.
‘Blogs’ is a topic we discuss regularly. Every week, on a Tuesday, we have an agenda item that prompts us to ask ourselves if we have a blog topic for the month, if not, this gives us a task to think of a topic before next week.
If we have a topic, we discuss a review of the blog between peers. This helps with the quality of the blog itself (yes, I know, you are wondering how this one managed to scrape through!). This discussion of the blog then allows us to publish it. Once this has been done we review a checklist of sharing the blog in different ways – our SharePoint site, Linkedin or Inside Strathclyde (an internal newsletter).
This is not a blog about blogs, it is about telling you we have a mechanism to ensure that we always do the things we have committed to doing, doing them well and on time. The tool we use is our Daily Stand Up agenda. This lets us keep on top of our operational tasks every single day.
It sounds simple – an agenda is basic, it’s not ground-breaking, but it is effective. Same as you maybe go to a meeting that has an agenda sent out beforehand. You can prepare for attending, you can expect that the meeting will cover everything on the agenda, and you can expect that the meeting will run on time. What is the experience of a meeting without an agenda? All the topics might not be covered, it might run over, you might even be at the meeting thinking – why am I here?
In our team, we have a Daily Stand Up every day, have done for over a decade. 99 times out of 100, it finishes on time or earlier. We don’t miss anything off the agenda and everyone in the team is prepared. It is all because of the agenda. It keeps us going and over the years, we have tailored it to suit our needs.
One of our team members has said several times, if I could only have one continuous improvement tool, it would be the DSU. It is that powerful for getting you organised, set up for the day, and understand what is happening with you and the rest of the team.
If you would like to find out more about our Daily Stand Up meetings, you can read some of our previous blogs. We also offer training for internal staff and external organisations.
