How to deal with stand-up meetings in the open space that have no privacy?

Question

I am in a software development project and we have daily stand-up meetings, which are held in the open space next to other peoples' desks.

I would prefer to have more privacy during the meeting, since some of the things we discuss are not meant to be heard by the people working nearby. This is because we are several teams that work independently, but demand deliverables from each other, since the global project we are working on is the same.

Also, I think it is disturbing to the people working nearby to have the noise from our meeting interrupting their work.

In general, is it normal to have stand-up meetings in the open or should they be held in a closed meeting room?

How should I deal with this particular situation? I've already mentioned this to the project managers and they failed to find a room that was available. This has been a while and they have not made any attempt to find a room.

Edit: If we talk about problems we have with the other teams, we obviously don't want them to overheard what we are saying. The meetings are scheduled for 15 minutes but tend to be longer.

Answer 1

In general, is it normal to have stand-up meetings in the open or should they be held in a closed meeting room?

There's two sides to it.

a) The stand-up meeting is open to guests. That's part of the transparency. Anyone could come in and hear your project and your status.

b) Holding your stand-up so other teams are basically forced to attend due to limited space is not acceptable. Not because of privacy, but because you are interrupting the other teams.

So yes, your meeting should be in a closed room, but it should also be completely open to anyone on other teams. If you have problems with other teams, talk with them, not about them. Except for retrospectives, there is no privacy in agile. Privacy hinders information flow and collaboration.

"agile" is no fixed set of rules I could quote, but "Openness" is a core value of Scrum. If you google daily stand-up, in one way or another it will say that the team and scrum master are the active participants and PO, Stakeholders and basically anyone else interested can be a passive participant.

The proper thing to do would be to grab the other guy right in that meeting and say "hey, we have been waiting for weeks now, we need to get our task done, can you deliver on date X or do we need to find another solution? It's about talking with people, not talking about people.

Even if you do traditional instead of agile: talking about people behind their backs is not solving any problems. Talk to them and find a solution with them. If you do that, it should not be a problem to have people listen to your daily.

Answer 2

Open does not necessarily mean candid, and candid does not necessarily mean blunt/rude.

It's entirely reasonable to say -- in public -- that you are waiting for work required from someone else, inside or outside your department. Nontechnical speculation/opinion on why the work hasn't been completed is neither needed nor appropriate in this meeting; if you need to discuss that, do it later/offline.

Answer 3

It's not ideal that your stand-ups are out in the open in front of other teams. It prevents you from speaking your mind.

That being said, you can be honest without being mean.

• If you are blocked on team Y, say you are blocked on team Y. If this is true, this is not "mean"; it is true, and it is their fault. It is their responsibility to fix it. If they don't want to hear it, that's tough. They need to hear it, and they will hear it whether it comes from your manager in person or by overhearing your stand-up.

• If it's actually not their fault but a result of bad planning on your manager's part, then it's your manager's fault and he needs to hear that in your stand-up anyway. Ideally he'll own up to the problem immediately. If he doesn't, that's a new question.

• If you have anything bad to say about team Y that doesn't affect your work, then it has no part of stand-up. Talk about it confidentially with your manager during your weekly one-on-one meeting, or maybe consider not saying anything at all if it's not a constructive complaint.

Answer 4

As others have pointed out, these meetings are meant to be open to your co-workers, so discussing personal grievances at them is not acceptable in the first place. But trying to keep your meeting somewhat contained and out of the way of the other teams is a reasonable effort.

I would find it very odd if team-members working together on the same project aren't seated near each other - if that isn't the case, a change in seating arrangements might be in order, so that you can hold these meetings together in a semi-private manner around one person's desk.

If your team is not seated near each other, perhaps one of your co-workers has a desk that is more isolated than the others, or co=workers who are not around at the usual time of your stand-up meeting - this would be an ideal location for your meeting.

And if management isn't completely against the idea of moving the meeting to an enclosed office space, but cannot find one, you could take a moment of your time (when you aren't supposed to be busy doing something else) to find some space yourself, that you know is open at the time of your meeting, and suggest holding it there if appropriate.

You might even be able to hold it outside, if your office area has an outdoors space that belongs to your company, and enough freedom that you could reasonably suggest this - but it would be fairly unusual and awkward to hold business meetings in a space even more open to the public, so I wouldn't recommend it.

The bottom line is, if there isn't any office desk that offers more privacy, and no other location in your building to hold the meeting or elsewhere, you may be stuck holding it around other people. In which case, try to keep the meeting brief, try to stick to tasks related directly to your work, and try not to say anything you wouldn't want to say in front of your co-workers - if someone outside your group is holding up your work, you should be telling them this before it comes up in the meeting, then you can briefly mention it at the so that your co-workers know you've already addressed this issue to the best of your ability.

Answer 5

I'll give you a Scrum answer.

1. Limit the time allocated to each team member: if you do this uncompromisingly, the total time will look after itself. We gave everybody 2 minutes for the 3 questions: what tasks did you complete yesterday? What will you do today? What is getting in your way? I used an egg timer to indicate when 2 minutes had passed.
2. If you find that your team member Alice is being blocked by team Dodo, say, write it down, and move on the team member Bob. Don't allow Alice to spend time dumping on team Dodo. When the (presumed) majority who aren't being blocked are done, dismiss them, and have a one-on-one with Alice about team Dodo.
3. I found that holding the standup at desks worked better that taking time to go to a meeting room, booting out the previous meeting, waiting for stragglers, etc. But do you not have any non-work spaces, such as an atrium or cafeteria?

Answer 6

At my previous company, the largest project's daily standup was held near other people's desks. It was very disruptive. I once asked why they didn't get a room and was told that they needed access to the test machines they were standing in front of. (I'm not sure why that matters at a standup, but I didn't push further.) So, the first thing is to find out if there is some specific reason they think they need to meet there as opposed to somewhere else. If the specific location matters to them, there might not be much you can do.

Assuming it's not something like that: when some are content with the status quo and others want a change, the burden of doing something about it falls to the latter. You've suggested moving and they haven't. Your coworkers might have complained about the noise and it didn't help. What can you do to make it easier to get the outcome you want? Perhaps you can find and book a suitably-sized, conveniently-located meeting room -- then your suggestion isn't "get a room" but "I've got a room; let's meet there". If the concern is openness, make sure everybody knows when and where that meeting is and that anybody can walk in.

If you do need to talk about other teams out in the open, you can report facts without conveying opinions or frustration. But it can be frustrating to have to run everything you might say in your 2 minutes of air time through the "can this be taken badly if overheard?" filter, I agree. If you need to make the "it's bad to be overheard" argument, try casting it that way -- you want people to focus on sharing needed information, not on monitoring the potential audience and perhaps withholding information as a result.

Answer 7

Let me switch and focus on something nobody else has mentioned.

Find a room.

I don’t mean book one, or go through normal channels, but every time you do a stand up, find the nearest unoccupied room and use it. Don't worry about whether the room is booked - if nobody is in it, use it. If your workplace is anything like mine there are loads of rooms booked by somebody for a meeting that doesn't actually happen. A stand up should be short enough that if the room isn't occupied then it won't get occupied until the stand up is over.

The Scrummaster can take a few minutes before standup to scout available rooms. If you really can't find one, find another space that disturbs others as little as possible. Only when that isn't an option should you meet in the general working space.