[teampractices] Dialy Scrum and timezone differences

[Arthur Richards]

Chrstian, in your particular case, it sounds like the daily scrum is biased
towards UTC-7. 10am is a perfectly reasonable time for a meeting, but as
you point out 20:00... not so much. What if you bumped the meeting forward
somewhere between an hour or two so the spread is a little more even? even
a spread of 9am - 7pm feels more reasonable to me; or perhaps depending on
people's schedules make it 8am - 6pm. For folks in UTC-7, maybe make it OK
for them to do standup from home before commuting in to the office, or
whatever. And has been suggested elsewhere, perhaps doing this every day is
too much of a burden. Experiment!

I think in a case like S describes, it's really important to make good use
of asynchronous tools for managing work (like Mingle). In the event that
engineers can't sync up before starting or ending their day, hopefully all
they really need to do is turn to the tool to see what's been done since
they last worked and what is next to work on.

Otherwise, in terms of actually scheduling meetings, there are going to be
cases where there just is no perfect time (eg when scheduling between
Europe, US, Australia). In that case, figuring out how best to share the
pain across all the different timezones is probably the best you can do
(one regular meeting screws over the europeans, the next screws over folks
in the US, the next screws over the Australians, etc). If your meeting
schedule can be regular and predictable, it's much easier to work around
and share the burden of coping with big timezone differences.


On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:40 AM, S Page <spage at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The Flow team has engineers in Belgium (Matthias Mullie) and Sydney,
> Australia (Andrew Garrett) -- perfect 8-hour triangulation :)
>
> We have 10:30 standups that Matthias can often attend, but we shifted our
> Tuesday meeting to 4:25pm (16:25) for Andrew's benefit, so we skip
> Wednesday since there are only a few work hours in between. We skip Friday
> though have retrospectives on it.  So we have standups three times a week.
>
> The engineer(s) who can't attend send an e-mail status update, and we send
> out standup minutes. It's still a challenge for engineers to know what
> others have done or will do while they're sleeping.
>
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-- 
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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