November 27, 2014 at 6:53 am
For managers the best kind of meeting is the meta-meeting. A meeting in which you do nothing other than discuss other meetings.
November 27, 2014 at 6:58 am
In my experience the "just want to hear how everyone is doing" meeting can often turn into the manager talking for the full hour with nobody else getting a word in edgeways.
If everyone writes a weekly status report then the manager can remain informed on how people are doing. Additionally the occasional walk about can help too, one person might only require a minute another might require more support and assistance, but this way not everyone's time is wasted.
November 27, 2014 at 7:12 am
will 58232 (11/27/2014)
...Additionally the occasional walk about can help too, one person might only require a minute another might require more support and assistance, but this way not everyone's time is wasted.
This is where stand ups provide a lot of benefit. Everyone must be brief and just say what they are working on and if they have any issues. For many this will be just a sentence like "Implementing feature X. No issues." which makes it very brief. A stand up with a dozen people without issues can be completed in two minutes.
If there are any issues then people highlight when they have input, be it that they have the same or related issue or can shed some light, and it is taken offline i.e. after the stand up. This ensures that everyone in the stand up knows what everyone else on the team is working on and what are the current issues. It also leads to only the people involved in an issue getting dragged in.
The stand up is the place to highlight issue resolution. Again, briefly.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
November 27, 2014 at 7:58 am
...it is taken offline i.e. after the stand up.
When an ex-manager of mine told me they's speak to me offline about something I couldn't help help replying that I wasn't a printer.
The problem we have at the moment is three way meetings and meta-meetings. We're dealing with two different but related companies that both have different needs for the same data. We have a meeting with company X who have a meeting with company Y who have a meeting with us and then we all have a meeting. This cycle can continue for weeks because of the endless loop of questions and answers that's generated. The irony is there it's only our company that benefits from the process dragging out.
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November 27, 2014 at 9:29 am
Two of my colleagues are half way through a year long project. The workload for the pair them was estimated as 36 months excluding meetings – pure coding, understandably the project is behind schedule. They are expected to attend 10+ hours of meetings a week each. At recent “lessons learnt” meeting (in other words “why are we so far behind schedule?”) one of them actually told the PM “if we spent more time doing what we are supposed to be doing and less time talking about it, we wouldn’t be so far behind”. Apparently the PM was livid.
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November 27, 2014 at 10:20 am
If 9 manager hold a meeting then that is 10 hours productivity gained because they are not distracting other people.
Writing status reports is an utter pain but sometimes necessary. Its when 3 different sets of managers all insist that they have their own bespoke report! If geography allows I'd say that a simple board with a "tasks done this week" section should be on display.
I quite like the Kanban method and one particular wrinkle I saw was where a fluorescent pink postit note was used to indicate a blocker. It was a managers duty to enquire about the blocker and remove the blocker.
November 27, 2014 at 10:25 am
David.Poole (11/27/2014)
...It was a managers duty to enquire about the blocker and remove the blocker.
Smart. Put the responsibility on someone who can influence. Like it.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
November 28, 2014 at 12:44 am
It is clear here that meetings mean different things to different rungs on the corporate ladder.
As a DBA, if I call a meeting, then it is technical in nature. My meetings are not too long (15-30 mins) and they require a resolution, usually because I am about make a change that has potential consequences for other people. For example, if I intend drop what seem to be non-performing indexes, then I will inform the head of the development team to inform him of this, in case these dropped indexes will be necessary for the next release. I will inform the testing team of the changes that require testing and so on, but not in the same meeting. I could send e-mails, I suppose, but I never know if they've been read or even assimilated. Face-to-face works best when change is involved.
However, the higher up the corporate ladder one goes, the more one needs to know what the people under you are doing. One needs to steer the corporate ship in the right direction. I am thankful that I have only one formal meeting per week (DBA meeting) and a couple of technical conversations per week with people from other departments (developers, sysadmins, business analysts). No man is an island.
On a final note, I leave you all with a reference to my favourite news source, The Onion: http://www.theonion.com/articles/takecharge-cando-guy-makes-horrible-decisions,717/
December 1, 2014 at 8:39 am
I was the developer on a project where the project "leader" scheduled a weekly two hour meeting. Her meetings perpetually started 15 minutes late because she always had trouble getting her laptop setup to use the projector and she would insist on ending the meeting late because the meeting started late. Once, in a different conference room, she recruited the participants to help hookup the phones for the conference call.
If it takes one 15 minutes to setup a project, then go to the meeting 15 minutes before the start time and get it setup. That demonstrates disrespect for the other meeting participants.
PS:
Her schedule was impossible to write a clean-slate application. The only alternative was move the hosting of the web application from one state agency to another.
December 8, 2014 at 1:34 pm
You can improve the selection of attendees, but never quite get it perfect. There will always be those you missed and the meeting decisions are poorer for it. You will also have those you wished weren't there and because they were the meeting decisions are poorer for it. You can't win. You can just try harder.
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