A simple daily standup meeting Excel template to coordinate all the work your team needs to do.

Standup meetings are about focus and accountability. They keep the team on the same page on personal and business levels. Get the daily standup meeting Excel template to achieve that easily.

Scrum ceremonies including a daily Scrum meeting help to keep the whole team focused on the sprint goals showing who’s doing what. And it does not matter whether the team is office or remote one. Here is the way how to run them efficiently.

1. Pick a schedule that works for everyone on your team;

2. During a meeting ask everyone three simple questions:

– what did you accomplish yesterday?

– what do you plan on doing today?

– do you have any obstacles?

3. Keep a meeting duration within 15 minutes — be short and concise.

Remember, your goal is to let team members talking about how team goals are progressing. Thus, don’t fall into asking each person to report their status.

Tips on running standup meetings

don’t skip a meeting if someone can’t attend; it’s better to have it with the half of your team than don’t have it altogether;

сelebrate small victories by telling a team “good job” after a task is completed; as a result, your team should feel more motivated after a standup meeting;

if your team is remote or has flexible schedules try running asynchronous standups via Slack ;

Remote work comes at a cost

But, standup meetings only seem like an easy project management practice. In fact, many Product Owners and Agile teams face challenges with it, especially when going remote.

When the whole team is in the same office, it’s easy to raise your hand and shout “stand up time!”. But if you have remote workers with their own schedules and life routines it becomes harder scheduling a recurring daily meeting with the whole team.

If you have remote workers with their schedules and life routines, it becomes harder for a Scrum Master to schedule a recurring daily scrum meeting with the whole team.

The more significant the time difference, the harder it gets. Even if a team has a couple of hours time difference, it’s still a pain in … in the schedule.

So what do you do? You ask the team to provide their standup updates via email.

It may work, but the information is unstructured, gets lost in threads, especially if someone hits “reply to all”.

Daily Standup Meeting Excel Template

I prepared a Daily Standup Meeting Excel Template that your team members can quickly fill up to stay on the same page. It becomes a single source of truth to coordinate all the work your team needs to do.

There are two ways to fill and save inputs in the Standup Meeting Template: sorting by people first or sorting by questions first. Choose what works the best for you.

Sorted By People

All answers are tied to a person. This way you go from one to another to see the progress and obstacles of your team. It’s a classic variant used by many Agile teams.

Sorted By Questions

Some managers like observing the progress by each team member. You start with a question answered by each person. This way you see the whole picture of yesterday/today/obstacles easily.

Here are the templates:

– Daily Standup Meeting Excel Template (Direct download)

– Daily Standup Meeting Template for Google Doc

Now you automate sending a daily standup meeting template via email to all of your team members. Feels much better, isn’t it?

But, hold on if you use Slack.

Let me tell you how to put standups on autopilot on Slack. Shameless plug below.

You can use a Slack bot Standuply instead of a daily standup meeting excel template to gather responses from your team members. Standuply runs standups by reaching out to your team members in Slack and asking them questions you define.

Once team members provide their answers, the bot collects them and prepares an overall report for your team. Results can be delivered to a Slack channel or via DM, email or Webhook.

Agile is about being consistent. It is demanding, but consistency makes it work. Read more on Agile Project Management in our perfect guide.

Pick what works best for your team: daily calls, standup bot in Slack or Daily Standup Meeting Excel Template and stick with it.

P.S. Check out my latest article: Scrum Meeting Myths, Anti-patterns, and Best Practices and a new guide on running good retrospective meetings – Scrum Retrospective Teardown — Best Practices and Tools.