Remote Teams and Standup

Agile standup meetings are a struggle for the teams I observe and manage, all of which have people in more than one location.  I'm not sure we're collaborating the right way for the work we do and the way we work.

Teleconferencing with more than three people is painful.  It's one thing to get six or ten people together in the team aisle for 10 minutes for a quick round of "what changed since yesterday."  Standing up actually makes sense, in that scenario.  But conference-room speakerphones change that dynamic radically.  Even videoconferences aren't great; the latency, poor audio quality, and limited field of vision make it much lower bandwidth.  No one who regularly uses remote conferencing technology, at least the sort my teams have access to, would call it a team-building or bonding experience.

The rules for standup are unnatural.  The standup is not supposed to be a status report; but the difference between a status report and a story update is too subtle for most people.  Unless we have great discipline, people talking one by one naturally turns into a status report, and status reports are boring and useless.  Similarly, the standup is not supposed to be a problem-solving session; once an issue requiring collaboration is identified, we are supposed to park it for later.  But engineers like to solve problems, so unless we have great discipline, talking about our challenges naturally turns into a technical problem solving session.

How could we honor our instincts?  Why do we work so hard in standup to avoid doing the natural thing to do, especially when it's a thing that is beneficial?  We want collaborative problem solving, and we want to feel connected to each other and to the team's progress and problem-solving flow.  How can we structure our meetings so that what we want to do is the same as what we should be doing?

One idea might be to schedule an hour every day, immediately after standup, for small-group collaboration.  Use the standup to identify the collaboration that needs to happen, and then spend the next hour doing the collaboration, in twosomes or threesomes.  If you don't need to be involved you don't have to be; if you do, you've already got it on your schedule.  This would make the "parking lot" more real; for distributed teams, once you hang up the phone it's hard to regroup.

Another idea would be to have our webcams on fulltime.  If you're at your desk, no matter what city it's in, your coworkers can see you.  Working from home?  Wear your clean pajamas.  The problem with this, again, is that our technologies aren't up to par.  Ideally I'd have a little row of realtime video thumbnails across the top of my screen, one for every coworker, and any time I wanted to ping them I could just click.  I'm not aware of a product like that.  Would someone like to build me one?