Below are listed some common answers for a few more complex activities in S&P
- How to paste formatted markdown into report dialog?
- Do images work?
- How to stop the bot from mentioning users?
- What are the Standup & Prosper hidden commands?
- How to make standups aware of the user's timezone?
- The owner of the standup is no longer part of the Slack workspace.
- How to improve replies to the standup report?
- What does the report portal look like?
- How to set a reminder on Friday for a Monday standup?
- Why was the standup 5 minutes late?
Click Create a new issue and ask away, or if you figured out something that you want everyone to know, just click edit the FAQ. (You'll need an github.com account for this). If neither of those are options that work for you, send an email to the Standup Support DL.
If you go on vacation or someone clicks Everyone is on vacation, you will be marked as on vacation. While on vacation, the bot will not send you any messages, and automatically assumes you are skipping every standup in your workspace. If this happens and you are actually back from vacation, just message the bot with the message: I'm back from vacation.
Alternatively, you can go to the app home in Slack, and click I'm back from vacation button.
There are two options for how to post the standup report.
- Posting the report directly to the channel makes it possible to reply to individual questions or to team members.
- Sending the report to a thread is great for channels with lots of communication and prevents disruptions
Unless your channel is one that has more than 20 people in it, Standup & Prosper recommends posting directly to the channel.
Threaded responses are hidden in the thread:
You can share images into the standup using the direct message dialog:
The bot will render the image as a link to be clicked on by your team members:
A common question about scheduling is "I want to have every user in the standup get reminded at 10:00AM in their timezone to answer the standup, how do I do this?". Great, the best way to achieve this for your team is to create one standup in each of the timezones where the users are, and assign just the users for the timezone to that standup. It might seem that it would be better to have a single standup, which has a single report time, however that's actually not the best pattern.
Let's take a look at some common problems that the multi-standup approach solves. For this, we'll assume there is one team in EST (UTC-4) and one team in IST (UTC+5.5):
- If the report time is at 5PM EST--then IST enters their standup at 10AM IST, but the report happens at 2:30AM IST that's not valuable for that team that has to wait 24 hours until they are in the office the next day to see the standup of their own team members. Likewise, the team in EST, also is waiting until the next day.
- If the report time is at 12PM EST--then IST enters their standup at 10AM IST, but the report happens at 9:30PM IST. That fixes the problem for EST but not IST.
Commonly, when focusing only on the complexity of configuration, we ignore the value provided by standups. Instead, S&P focuses on value provided to standup team members. Standup reports must be timely for the team member in the location they are entered in, they must also be visible. In the case we are waiting ~24hr before viewing, there are many things in a #channel that might push the report out of view. This makes it impossible for the report to useful. Conversely, if we post immediately, then only one team gets the benefit for timeliness. To optimize every location's standup potential, we actually want to control exactly every location separately.
Creating a separate standup for each timezone provides additional solutions such as:
- Different timezones can see their standups exactly when they need to.
- Channels without additional conversation (i.e. a dedicated #standup-channel will have the standups grouped together anyway, since there are no other posts there, so posting times differences are negligible).
- Different teams can potentially answer different questions, so specifically:
what does team A want to convey to team B, whom will be awake in 8 hours?. - Users may travel between timezones, and almost all never update their slack timezone, which causes additional confusion on when they should report and who they report with.
- Different timezones usually mean different cultures and specifically holidays. Disabling a standup for a week is doable in a timezone, such complexities would not be possible in a shared standup.
We are happy to work with you to design a solution that handles your team's standup value proposition. Our recommendation is to set up multiple standups one for each timezone, try it out, and let us know about anything that doesn't work. We can work together to create improvements that target those problems.
Any member of the standup (not any member of slack) can edit a standup. If there is a standup currently reporting that you don't have access to, the best thing to do is message the channel asking to be added to the standup. If there is a need for different standup roles for different standup access (edit configuration, review reports, answer standup), upgrade the account to Support Standard.
Q: What are the Standup & Prosper hidden commands?
There are two kinds of messages the bot responds to:
/standup(or/prosper)CMDa list of these are available at/standup help- Direct messages to the bot, a list of these is available by clicking the
Home tab-Help!button or messaging the botI want some help.
There is a dedicated reminder time that exists The weekend reminder. Create a second standup just enabled for Monday and set the weekend as your reminder time.
Unfortunately, I am not a Swiss train, I don't run exactly on time. I had a conversation with my developers, and they agreed to permit me some flexibility in scheduling of messages. Did you know there are lots of things that can get in my way, be it the network connections are down, my cloud provider is having troubles, or Slack is rejecting incoming messages. While I try to do the best I can, I do aim for the report time, plus or minus five minutes. I hope this works for you. If you could be a bit understanding, as I have millions of messages I need to handle every day, this helps me get them all delivered correctly. Consider me your standup Santa Claus:
🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌🛷🤖🔔
When the bot posts the report to the channel, the users of the report are tagged so they are aware that it is time to review the standup report. This functionality can be turned off Notify users of a standup when it posts.
The $20 charge you see at the beginning of your Standup & Prosper upgrade is a temporary authorization charge. This charge will not be completed and will fall off your card in a couple of days.
Standup & Prosper charges your card at the end of the month based on the number of monthly active standup members. If your workspace has 20 members, but only 10 of them used Standup & Prosper, then at the end of the billing cycle, you will be charged $10.
If for any reason, this charge still goes through please reach out to our Support.