Old School StandUps

Working in a distributed environment with people from all over the world poses unique challenges to the “Daily Standup” routine. At Off Grid Electric, we work across several continents and timezones. This means we don’t have the ability to all sync up with each other every day at a specific time. However, the need for being aware of what each other is working on still exists. It made sense to find a technology solution to address our needs. Since we were already invested in using Slack, it was decided to give Geekbot a try…

Say Hello to Geekbot

Geekbot is a Slack Bot that allows you to easily set up daily standups with your team. You choose the time and the set of questions that you want each person to answer.

Team Members in the Daily StandUp

Then every day at that particular time (based on the user’s timezone) each person will receive a message on Slack to enter their report. The bot will walk each person through three simple questions:

What did you accomplish yesterday?

What will you do today?

What obstacles are impeding your progress?

Once you’ve answered the questions your response is posted to your team’s “#daily-standup” channel on Slack. And that’s it!

Example Standup Report

Now as your coworkers come online they can view your report and take action as needed. The “Blockers” section is especially beneficial, as often times someone will step up and assist with helping to get you un-blocked.

Another benefit of the Slack integration is that coworkers can start conversations easily about each other’s standup. For example, when I posted the above about finishing up my Ruby course, a few other developers chimed in about courses they were exploring as well. This is a great way to build camaraderie among team members who happen to be miles away from each other.

Dashboard View

Geekbot ships with a few commands that you can execute from within Slack. One of them is dashboard. This gives you the ability to see a Dashboard View of how your team is doing with submitting the daily standups. This is helpful for managers to gauge compliance at a glance.

Geekbot has been a welcome addition to our daily Slack routine. If you work on a distributed team, how do you keep each other in the loop?