I’m feeling quite reflective – I have been at the University now for almost 20 years (I know you are thinking that it must have been straight from school but believe me it wasn’t)! I’ve been in the Continuous Improvement team for the last 11 years of that time.
Having just spoken to a department about how we run our Daily Stand-Up meeting, it made me realise how much these meetings have evolved over the time they have been in place. If you want to know more about these meetings, you can read a previous blog, A Few Key Elements to Facilitate the Successful Implementation of Daily Stand Up Meetings.
When these started, the format was the team standing around a board with paper forms to be updated. The forms and agenda were printed out and updated during the meeting. We had different coloured pens and highlighters to do different things, like mark off that we had had any health and safety issues, or marking off annual leave on our resource plan. Our improvement ideas were called 3Cs (Concern, Cause, Countermeasure) and were raised on a paper form, and we marked progress on these too. Our rota was red, yellow and green markers next to our names showing Lead, Scribe and Reserve roles.
Fast forward to now, (summer 2025), our Daily Stand Up (DSU) looks completely different. For starters, we all sit down (maybe time for a name change, but DSU is so ingrained), some people are attending sitting in the office, others are at home, we have an agenda but it is a Power BI dashboard embedded on our SharePoint site, our improvement ideas are raised via MS Forms and are automatically added to a SharePoint List, the agenda, resource plan, rota are all supported by Lists. It is difficult to remember just how many different iterations our DSU has gone through to get to where we are now. So how did we get here?
It seemed like a big improvement when we stopped recording improvement ideas directly onto the paper forms and used whiteboard markers to write on the acrylic holders during the meeting to be written on the paper afterwards. Another big change was our move to recording improvement ideas to Trello – at this point we were still using the board, we were all standing round it, but moving away from sheets of paper to record improvement ideas. This change made it much easier to understand the spread of allocated ideas across the team, how many were in progress and how many had been closed off and implemented. This could all be pulled easily from Trello.
Another major change came in 2020 with Covid lockdowns – we were all suddenly working from home. We never missed one DSU though. We were able to easily move the entire DSU board onto a Trello board and continue our meetings online over Zoom. Our blog on Hybrid Daily Stand Ups goes into more detail about this if you are interested.
After a few years of using Trello over Zoom, we stopped using it and switched to Teams and moved everything to SharePoint, Power BI, and Forms to run and manage our DSU meetings. We are the Continuous Improvement team after all, so you would expect us to be making changes and improvements as we move along. It is very different to how we started out, but still recognisable as a DSU. Not everything we have tried has worked, but that is ok, it is better to try something and for it not to work than not try it at all.
In the next blog, my colleague Jacquelyn will talk about how she has set up the latest version of the Daily Stand Up.
Contact us if you would like to learn more about implementing your own DSU meeting.
Check our some of our other blogs on the Daily Stand-Up meetings to see the difference between now and then.
Hybrid Daily Stand Ups: https://www.strath.ac.uk/workwithus/trainingconsultancy/continuousimprovementforyourorganisation/ourblogs/hybriddailystandups/
A Few Key Elements to Facilitate the Successful Implementation of Daily Stand Up Meetings: https://www.strath.ac.uk/workwithus/trainingconsultancy/continuousimprovementforyourorganisation/ourblogs/afewkeyelementstofacilitatethesuccessfulimplementationofdailystandupmeetings/
Seven Benefits of a Daily Stand Up: https://www.strath.ac.uk/workwithus/trainingconsultancy/continuousimprovementforyourorganisation/ourblogs/sevenbenefitsofadailystandup/
Daily Stand Ups – Making Changes: https://www.strath.ac.uk/workwithus/trainingconsultancy/continuousimprovementforyourorganisation/ourblogs/dailystandups-makingchanges/
The Evolution of Daily Stand Ups – My Experience:
