Meetings - we don’t need no stinking buckets!

April 30, 2008 from Raven's Brain: Project Management

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Johanna Rothman has an interesting piece on meeting management: Why Does a Meeting Need Buckets?None Of Us Is As Dumb As All Of Us. Here's a hint - they don't! If you are anti-status meeting or think "going 'round the horn",  which is a snazzy way of saying "going around the entire table to ask each and every person to talk about what they are doing and then listen while the same question is asked and answered by every member in your group", wastes time (and slowly kills you inside) you'll enjoy Johanna's piece. And, uhm, If you don't think these meetings are time wasters you must not have attended one! One-on-Ones, or 1:1, are growing in popularity to help alleviate the time wasting and provide more effective communication between manager and employee. Here's an excerpt from the post:

I asked what he discussed at his meetings. “Oh, what everyone is doing.” How long are the meetings? “One to two hours.” Oh my. There is a better way.

I told him to cancel his next meeting and conduct one-on-ones with his managers instead if he needed to see status. I also told him it was worth deciding which problems he would try to solve in a group meeting. He’s got too many managers, so he can’t address everyone’s problems in one meeting–and shouldn’t. He needs to have meetings with the relevant people, make sure people discuss and develop an action plan with action items.

If you’re in a similar pickle, thinking you need status meetings, you can reset that thinking right now. Status meetings are not meetings; they are rituals. If your attendees would prefer your ritual meetings with doughnuts or wine or their laptops or cell phones or something else that distracts them from your meeting, it’s time to reconstitute your meeting.

Read more here: http://jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2008/04/why-does-a-meeting-need-buckets.html

Yes indeed - there is a better way and 1:1 meetings really help. I love the quote in the image above "None Of Us Is As Dumb As All Of Us". Isn't that grand? If you are still wrestling with old school status meetings in your particular organizations, try to help management understand that, though there is a time and place for "all hands" meetings, often it is more effective to have meetings set with specific agendas and limited attendees, and this includes changing management's communication behavior in conducting one on one, manager and employee, meetings for more effective feedback and communication. 
 
Check out this opinionated (slightly harsh) excerpt from Craig Borysowich's post Why your meetings suck!:
The other complete waste of time is the supposed “status meetings”.  Waste of time.  Status is for reporting – NOT MEETING.  If you can’t have a team complete status reports on what they have done and what their issues are – get a new team.  Even if there is an agenda – I never go to meetings that include status in the title.  Project managers that operate with status meetings should simply be taken to the middle of a desert, shot in both knees and left for dead.  9 times out of 10 the other members of the meeting are not interested in my status report any more than I am interested in theirs.  Assembling everyone to listen to them is a complete waste of everyone’s time. Don’t ever do this. There is only one reason a project manager should use a status meeting – he doesn’t know how to read. If you have a functional illiterate as a project manager on your project – my heart goes out to you.
 
Read more here: http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/implementation/archives/why-your-meetings-suck-4310
Project status meetings are a bit trickier than your average "state of the union" status meeting that plague most organizations. If held correctly a PM status check can be a streamlined process where key points are covered and other offline (non meeting) tools are used to check a given project's status - intranets, project server, share point, web sites, other collaboration tools, etc. that allow everyone to update their status as needed and management/others can always access a current snap shot of the project's health and status.
 
Here are a few thoughts from jessetrucks's post Managing Meetings on the more traditional time-wasting status check:

Don't ever hold "status" meetings.
Distribute status documentation to those who have a stake or vested interest instead of getting together to read out the status. If someone has further questions or a point requires discussion after knowing the current status of a particular project or issue, then either email, IM, or other means of communication may be more suited for clarification. Once the point(s) are clarified, update the documentation and redistribute the updated versions or links to online records. If an interactive discussion is required at some point to agree on the updates or changes, then call a meeting together - following the other points of advice, of course.

Read more here: http://lopsa.org/node/122

And on and on go the resources for A. Killing the dreaded status meeting, B. Using 1:1's effectively, C. Managing meetings and commmunicating more effectively. Here's one touting their need in certain cases Status Meetings Are Necessary, and another one also discussing their importance Skillful Project Management Tips - Status Meetings. I know some teams that use the daily meeting (whether it be a SCRUM/Agile standup, daily dev meeting, etc.) to their advantage, but you must have rules or you really are wasting a lot of others people time. If the 1:1 approach will not work for you - say you need a project status meeting - then create meeting rules, publish an agenda and stick to it, and be a strong meeting leader and facilitator to keep your meeting on track.
 
Here's some additional related reading:

Posted by Raven Young at Raven's Brain under Project Management
Technorati tags: Project Management, Project Meetings, Meetings, Efective Meetings


This article is syndicated from Raven's Brain: Project Management . The original article is available here. Read more in Project Management News, Raven's Brain: Project Management .

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