Don't say 'Yesterday' in a stand-up!

At ThoughtWorks Pune office, we were observing a regular pattern in Stand-up. Everybody will start to speak with “Yesterday, I did this… I did that…” and whole team used to feel it more of a status update and not giving idea and sharing the context. To address this issue, one of our team-mate came with a suggestion to avoid using word “Yesterday” in the stand-up. Now you don’t have word yesterday with you, you will be automatically forced to give a update which involves not only yesterday’s work but more than that. This worked great until following conversation happened…

(Names of the team-members are changed)

Friday, 14 Sept, 9:30 IST

… Ganpat: “Yesterday, I worked on …”

Keshubabu: “Ganpat, don’t use word ‘yesterday’ or at least avoid using that…”

Ganpat: “Ok. Day-before-today I worked on…”

Whole team: !!!!!!!!!!!

That was a funny incident but, we really experienced value coming out of avoiding using word ‘Yesterday’. This helped us to achieve sharing of context of the story and not just yesterday’s work.

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