April 26, 2010 at 8:14 am
I see meetings as a cost of doing business. When I do database or programming work, I estimate that about 20% plus or minus 10% of the time will be related to meetings. I'd say in a typical database or application development projects, maybe 60% of it is actually spent on the "real work".
April 26, 2010 at 8:23 am
Question Guy (4/26/2010)
I see meetings as a cost of doing business.
I completely agree. However when they become more like 40% or more the cost, which I've seen, then it's bad. I don't want to eliminate them, just minimize them.
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April 26, 2010 at 8:47 am
I hate it when people just call a meeting with some cryptic subject line and no agenda or anything that would allow me to prepare for the meeting or decide if I even need to be there.
Usually, the less information you receive in advance, the more likely it is to be a complete waste of time.
April 26, 2010 at 9:20 am
Jeff Moden (4/24/2010)
Heh... supposed time wasted in meetings is the least of my worries. A bazillion emails and IM's are a total waste of time compared to the productive time of a meeting or face-to-face dialog. In fact, well structured and informative team meetings cut out a lot of the wasted time of emails and IM's in more ways than one.
I agree. There is nothing worse than a group of people trying to have a dialog via email! I have to deal with that situation on a daily basis, and it drives me crazy! I nip it in the bud with a quick face-to-face whenever possible.
Edited:
Let me just add that on one of my projects, we have semi-monthly meetings to bring everyone up-to-date and discuss issues. The agenda is very specific, and everyone comes prepared. The meeting usually runs long, but we get a lot of work done.
April 26, 2010 at 10:34 am
Meetings work best when there is a clear agenda, and actual decisions are made. If people hold off on actions and another meeting is required, this is a huge wast of time. As people have said, meetings that are well planned and prepared for are actually very valuable. I work in a distributed environment (I'm remote) and appropriately planned meetings are essential.
I think managers should look at who is necessary for a meeting, and who is optional. Inviting everyone for the sake of 'just incase' is a waste. However, often I see key stake holders being omitted, or brought in too late. For example design plans with no input from the technical people implementing the design... generally results in problems.
If it is a project meeting with business and technical people, generally the technical person only needs to be there for part of the meeting, to discuss the operational portion of a project. I think this is the key part that a lot of meeting organizers miss. They really need to look at the value of the individual's time.
I disagree on the 'reading' comment. Meeting minutes can be very valuable if done correctly. The should be concise, with the action items done, and the to-dos coming up. It is a good way to re-affirm that everyone is on the same page. Also, people's memory tends to become hazy, and having it written down in black and white can be valuable audit record.
April 26, 2010 at 11:10 am
Meetings are all too frequently where minutes are kept and hours are lost. The best meetings are the ones with an agenda, and people that understand and follow the agenda. The worst meetings have no preset agenda, and people show up late, or come and go.
April 26, 2010 at 11:19 am
A very effective way to keep meetings short and to the point is to:
i) start on time and accept no latecomers
ii) remove the furniture
If one-to-one meetings are needed, you can always go for an 'off desk' (yes, really. I have been invited to one of these. It was probably to do some blue sky thinking outside the box while I was saluting a new paradigm that had been run up the flagpole to see if it had legs...)
April 26, 2010 at 5:49 pm
My boss: "Just want to catch up with what everyone's doing". (1 hr meeting, 10 people, more than one complete "person day" lost)
Senior project manager: "Need to keep everyone in the loop" (for a "nothing has changed" meeting - 25 people, 1 hr, 2.5 "person days" lost)
these are weekly meetings, what a complete, total waste of time.
Best place I ever worked, it was mandatory to watch the John Cleese "Meetings" series as part of your induction training. Every meeting had a clear agenda, every participant knew exactly what their part of the meeting was (including the monthly 'project tracking' meetings).
April 26, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Jeff Moden (4/24/2010)
Heh... supposed time wasted in meetings is the least of my worries. A bazillion emails and IM's are a total waste of time compared to the productive time of a meeting or face-to-face dialog. In fact, well structured and informative team meetings cut out a lot of the wasted time of emails and IM's in more ways than one. There's nothing worse than the moroff down the hall trying to get complicated information one bloody IM or email at a time over an hour of instead of getting off his ever widening butt to have a 3 minute conversation.
I think Jeff has this one right - you can waste more time by not having a meeting than by having it.
The real problem is that many people don't understand that there are many different kinds of meetings, with many different purposes (ok, you can call all the purposes "communication" but in fact it's essential to distinguish between different kinds of communication if you want your meetings to be useful) and also don't understand that the appropriate set of people to attend a meeting depends on what sort of meeting it is and what its purpose it is.
If one of my people is in difficulty and needs to talk to someone more experienced about his problems, he should have a one to one meeting with the appropriate person - and if he doesn't know who the appropriate person is he should start by asing his immediate manager. This avoids the time-wasting emails and IMs that Jeff mentions. It may take more than the 3 minutes Jeff mentions - but if it takes 30 minutes, just sthink how many emails/IMs and how much misunderstanding it elimninates - competent technical people can exchange a massive amount of information in 30 minutes fact to face with a large whiteboard to help them.
When I have a new team of say a dozen people who don't know eachother well and are not communicating well with eachother I'm perfectly happy to spend mote than half a manweek each week on a team meeting just to improve communication and ensure that people get to know each other. If each team member has ten minutes toexplain what he's done in the last week and what problems he's facing and anser questions from other team members that's 24 man hours, which according to Steve's editorial is a lot of non-productive time. But after a few such meetings people are walking across to eachothers' desks to ask for help, working together, getting together in small groups (two or three of four people) to hammer out some issue on a whiteboard, and productivity soars; and the length of the team meetings drops because everyone knows most of what's going on, so only new big issues get discussed.
If I'm trying to dream up a way of meeting some set of requirements I'm happy to pull my senior people together, explain the requirements to them, explain where I am at in trying to design/architect a solution, and ask for suggestions/criticisms (including criticisms of the requirements if people think they are crazy). I will try to give themn a good written brief before the meeting, of course. And if any of them wants to being along a junior to present some scheme that's fine by me. In the early stages of a project such meetings may amount to more than 50% of costs, while reducing the long term costs to maybe 10% of what they would have bneen without the meetings (because they cause the requirements to change to something sane and get an overview of archicture and design that actually addresses the requirements rather than just following fashion or using someone's pet new technology). That is not counterproductive.
Meetings to discuss Gantt charts, milestones, Pert charts, progress, slippage, and all the other PM paraphenalia are often a complete waste of time because some project manager or senior executive thinks he needs the world and his dog at them; on the other hand they can be very useful if limited to the programme manager, the senior line manager involved (ie the person who "owns" the resources deployed on the project), and one team leader at a time (note that I'm excluding project managers from such meetings - they shouldn't be trying to do the programme managers' job for him, they should be doing their own job). If the program gets into real trouble, the program manager, the senior line manager, and maybe some more senor manager need to decide between them what to do - and one of the things they may decide to do is ask some of the senior technical people to suggest options to minimise the damage, which produces yet another meeting which can't be regarded as unproductive use of people's time.
Meetings at which some very senior but non-technical manager collects all the senior technical staff and project/program managers for the sole purpose of berating everyone in public for not achieving deadlines that were imposed without any consideration of the work required to meet them are always a waste of time, as are update meetings at which there is nothing to report. In fact update meetings are usually a mistake even when there is something to report, unless there is some other good reason for holding them; short written (paper or email) reports circulated to everyone who would be at such a meeting usually eliminate the need for it.
Tom
April 27, 2010 at 5:19 am
Thankfully, the meetings I go to tend to be quick and to the point.
However, what annoys me are emails which are blank other than the subject line: "Call me please", especially when it's something I could have replied to in the email with a one word answer!
My second gripe is when people hold meetings in our fairly small (6 PCs and a circular desk in the middle) development room, completely disrupting the developers.
Other than that, I think we do quite well - 1 hour weekly update meetings for the core developers, which are then written up and shared on SharePoint for anyone who needs/wants to read about what was discussed.
April 27, 2010 at 7:12 am
Jeff Moden (4/24/2010)
Heh... supposed time wasted in meetings is the least of my worries. A bazillion emails and IM's are a total waste of time compared to the productive time of a meeting or face-to-face dialog. In fact, well structured and informative team meetings cut out a lot of the wasted time of emails and IM's in more ways than one. There's nothing worse than the moroff down the hall trying to get complicated information one bloody IM or email at a time over an hour of instead of getting off his ever widening butt to have a 3 minute conversation.
Definitely understand this, but I also look at the other side too. I know people that I have emailed a simple question to that feel they have to call a meeting over it every time too. There is nothing wrong with face time, don't get me wrong, but it is not necessary in a lot of cases either IMHO. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
April 27, 2010 at 7:48 am
There is definitely a balance, but it's something that you need to work out over time, and pay attention to. Don't always send an IM (email can be better, causes less task switching), but if you can't resolve it in, say 2 msgs, get up and go ask. Or call a meeting.
If you find that you are calling a meeting for an issue and it's overkill, next time try sending a message.
It's a learning process, but the key is to pay attention and use some judgment.
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April 27, 2010 at 4:10 pm
Meetings in moderation are good.
Meetings just to have a meeting are a waste of time. If I can get accomplished in the meeting the items set forth in the agenda - then it should be productive. Sometimes, there is nothing better than a meeting to accomplish a project or to better hash out the project details.
If there is no true agenda or guide to the meeting, I would prefer to skip it.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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November 27, 2014 at 5:01 am
That was an interesting post and some thought-provoking comments.
Like a lot of you I view meetings as necessary but sometimes evil. 😉 I think the trick to reducing the "evil" is to keep the numbers small (both number of meetings and the number of people) and to have a clear agenda, or at least objectives.
Here's another thought... Does the number of people you invite reduce the probability of being able to hold the meeting at all? I was on a project where one of the managers liked to hold large meetings which he wanted to use to "communicate" with the team. His intentions were good. The problem was that people had other commitments and so didn't always attend the meetings. He finished up with poor communication. Because he had an analytical mind, I managed to convince him to try a different approach by plotting the family of curves:
ProbOfEveryoneAttending = (TypicalFreeAvailability) ** NumberOfPeople
If you say that people are committed to something else 20% of the time, then the chances of 8 people then the chances of everyone being able to attend at any particular time is 16%! (and I think 20% commitments is probably a low guess!)
Tom Gillies LinkedIn Profilewww.DuhallowGreyGeek.com[/url]
November 27, 2014 at 5:21 am
I think that there are a number of key points here (most, if not all, covered by previous posts):
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
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