SUP! –  A slack bot for daily stand-up

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We often come across different words like stand-up meetings, scrum calls, a daily scrum in our work life. We also know how important this particular meet is and how it can improve the overall performance of the team.

But have you ever thought that this meeting is wasting half of the time and ever felt so demotivated to participate in the meet?

Well, it’s very natural to feel that way. But have you ever thought for the reason, why it’s making you feel like that?

No wonder the reasons are very obvious. If you work for say good 8 hours a day and be in a stand-up meeting for 1-2 hours, you will hardly work for 6 hours and obviously could not complete what you were supposed to.

What happens in those 2 hours? The team or the management discusses different points like:

  1. What has to be done to achieve the goal?
  2. What are the blockers on their way?
  3. If any blockers, how to get rid of them?

Apart from these,

  1. Individual tasks were monitored
  2. Performance of the team is looked into
  3. Discuss improvising techniques

And a lot more based upon the business requirements. Everything will be fine until our 5-minute reporting was done, then starts the difficult part concentrating on each and everyone’s work, if it’s not your work it is very difficult to concentrate it is as simple as that.

It’s always suggested and advised to keep stand-up meetings as short as possible.

Ok, how much short?

As short as possible!!

Ok, but is it possible for everyone to gather and finish the meeting in just less than 15 minutes?

With the increase in the flexibility of working hours, it is almost impossible. Work culture over a period of time has been changed drastically, that there are no more strict rules. Comfort is the utmost priority that was given to the employees to bring maximum productivity.

One such change was the flexibility of working hours. So if a firm has 8-9 working hours, each member chooses their own time that is feasible for them and this makes it almost impossible to make stand-ups happen on time.

And when it comes to situations like a pandemic, where most of the IT companies choose to work remotely, it is a necessity that stand-ups have to be done online without wasting much time.


So, we at Inkoop came up with the unique idea of creating a Stand-up bot on slack, SUP!

What is SUP!

It is a slack bot, created by our team to make the daily stand-up process, a hassle-free task.

And it hardly takes 5 minutes to do the entire thing.

As mentioned earlier, we made it short and simple. It only contains, 3 different questions (but you can customize based on your needs):

  1. Yesterday’s work
  2. Today’s work
  3. Any blockers

Where each member in the team gets to know what others have done yesterday and what they are planning to do that particular day and any issues they faced while doing the work.

When everything is transparent, it just takes a few minutes to find out what the blockers are, and can decide upon plans to overcome that. Also, we can evaluate, how well the planned process is going and if observed any lag, we can change the plan easily and work on it.


What else SUP! Does?

SUP! Not only helps in the stand-up process also helps with many other things, which makes the whole process of connecting across the team, very easy.

Follow-ups

Not only for stand-ups, one can create their own follow-ups and it will remind you about that at the given time.

We can create many follow-ups for different projects at different times of the day and can get to know their status.

Templates

We can create as many templates as we need and can be reused.

Creating templates and making use of them when needed is very easy such that we avoid typing the same matter again and again on daily basis.

CSV Export

We usually get work reports on a daily basis, but to access them it is mandatory to log in to the slack app. We are adding this feature of “CSV EXPORT”, where we can actually export all the data received and can store it on the local device.

Timesheet

We can get daily updates from the employees about the status of the work by using a stand-up bot. But, what about the work reports of an extended team and freelancers??

Reports from them are very important as we can get to know the status of the project along with the timings that they have spent on our project

This can be done effectively by using a timesheet, as SUP! also reminds them to update the sheet on daily basis. By maintaining a timesheet, management can get to know about things like:

  1. How many hours did they work on our project?
  2. How much work was getting completed by them on a daily basis?

This ultimately helps in the payroll management of freelancers and extended teams.

Attendance Tracking

Different companies have different methods to track employee’s attendance, it was a lot easier if people have worked from the office by keeping biometrics, but now in pandemic situations, managing attendance is really a special task that should be taken care of. Yes, there are lots of HR-friendly apps and products available in the market for this purpose, but that would be an extra budget in this pandemic situation. So, we have designed this feature such that not only it helps in the stand-up process at the same time make a track record of employee’s attendance.


SUP! At Inkoop

This definitely is very helpful and plays a major role in daily stand-ups and reports.

  1. Time saver as we don’t need hours of scrum calls
  2. With many features in a single product, it prevented us from subscribing to multiple platforms, thus its money-saving for us.

Isn’t this amazing!!

If you are in need of any such app/product with any custom features, please feel free to reach out to Inkoop Website & Mobile App Development Company.