Daily Stand-up That Became a Status Meeting
On the Larkspur insurance claims project, the delivery team's daily stand-up is chaired by the team manager, Ken. It runs 35–40 minutes. Ken asks each of the nine people for a progress update, then assigns tasks for the day. Two team members have stopped attending, saying it is 'a waste of time'. A separate 45-minute 'status sync' with the project manager happens every Tuesday. The project manager, Priya, has read that PRINCE2 Agile expects servant-leadership behaviours and self-organising teams, but she is under pressure to give the board a weekly RAG status. A health check scored 'collaboration' as red.
1. Diagnose what has gone wrong with the stand-up against PRINCE2 Agile behaviours, and describe what a corrected stand-up looks like.
Read the worked answer
The stand-up has been converted into a manager-led status and allocation meeting. Against PRINCE2 Agile's behaviours:
- Self-organisation is removed-Ken assigns tasks rather than the team pulling work.
- Timebox is broken-35–40 minutes for nine people signals it is not a daily sync but a reporting ritual.
- Transparency is degraded-people update to the manager, not to each other, so blockers surface late.
- Servant-leadership is absent-the meeting serves Ken's need for control, not the team's need to coordinate.
A corrected stand-up: timeboxed to ~15 minutes, team-facilitated (rotating or by whoever needs it), each person answering the three coordination questions (what I did toward the sprint goal, what I'll do next, what's blocking me), no task assignment by the manager, blockers captured and taken offline, and the sprint goal visible. Ken's legitimate need for oversight is met by observing and by the information radiators, not by chairing.
2. Priya still must give the board a weekly RAG status. How should she reconcile that with the corrected stand-up without recreating the status meeting?
Read the worked answer
The board's need for a RAG status is legitimate; the mistake is sourcing it from a meeting that should serve the team. Priya should decouple the information flow from the team's coordination event:
- Derive status from artefacts, not interrogation-burn-down/burn-up, the sprint backlog, the highlighted risks and the health check give a defensible RAG without a 45-minute sync.
- Keep the Tuesday slot only if it earns its place-if it exists, make it a short decision forum for the project manager and the team's representative (e.g. the delivery lead), focused on exceptions, not a re-run of the stand-up.
- Use the 'manage by exception' principle-the board should hear about tolerance breaches and forecast trends, not a person-by-person account.
This preserves the servant-leadership behaviour (the team's meeting stays the team's) while satisfying governance. If the board insists on granular progress, that is a signal the tolerances or the reporting format need revisiting, not that the stand-up should be lengthened.