Mike-O-Matic

Once I had a manager who tended to call meetings for every little thing.

Did the server group drop the ball? Let’s get the team together and discuss our contingency plans. Is a project going to be done in the next month? Let’s get together to talk about what we might do next. Is it Wednesday? Then we definitely need to get together for our weekly meeting. We had event-driven meetings, calendar-driven meetings, and even impromptu meetings. You know, just to fill the gaps.

What impressed me the most about these meetings, though, was not their frequency; it was how little was accomplished.

Usually we were given a list on items to be covered, a page-long bulleted list with at least three levels of indentation. Discussions were often meandering and pointless since upper management had already decided what we were going to do. We would spend half an hour going over theoretical conversations we might have with our internal customer (we were an IT department within a larger organization) instead of just picking up the phone and having a real one. Sometimes he would fire up a web browser to show us some little detail on the site that needed to be fixed, only to fumble with the URL, lose track of where he was and start talking about something else, or be unable to reproduce the bug. And God forbid if there was a source code file around. He would open it up and start debugging right in front of us.

I am sure that there are some others out there who may have been in one pointless meeting too many. Here are some tips on how to make them go a little more productively.

1. Always Have a Point: Time-based meetings (every Wednesday!) are generally the least useful since they don’t have a specific purpose except to meet. Consequently, participants need to dig for something to talk about, and you can easily scrape the bottom of the barrel. Do we really need to get everyone together to talk about our vacation plans? Probably not. That is what the Outlook calendar is for. A lot of times regularly scheduled meetings are used to talk about long-term projects; even in this case, it is best to call meetings around milestone deliverables or significant events affecting the project.
2. Keep It Brief: People have a hard time paying attention for more than 45 minutes of monologue at a time. Respect this and try to keep the meetings focused and short; more brief, topical meetings are easier to digest than fewer all-embracing blabfests.
3. Don’t Talk About Stuff that Doesn’t Matter Yet: There is absolutely no reason to talk about a new business process or development environment that will not be implemented for 6 months. Nobody will remember what is said, and you will need to repeat it again in 6 months. If you are trying to get feedback on the new process or environment, that can still be meeting worthy, however.
4. Say It in Email: There are many cases where a full-blown meeting is unnecessary. If the goal is to pass around a new management decree, send around the PDF. If it is to highlight a new development process, email a link to the intranet site detailing it. Bringing people together to have them take dictation is a waste of time; save the effort and just email them the notes.
5. Interactivity Helps: People attending meetings will likely pay more attention if they are asked to participate. No, tacking on “Any questions?” at the end of the speech doesn’t count; they need to actually be engaged by the discussion. Have a developer give the status report. Show a demo of the new functionality. Ask the client to start the meeting by presenting a list of their most-desired features. If you can’t think of any way to get the attendees involved, see Step #4.
6. Smaller Groups Work Better: Having an all-hands gathering is good in the case of an awards ceremony or a State of the Organization address, but is ineffective in any setting where users are expected to remember the outcome. Most productive meetings occur in a circular arrangement with everyone facing one another; it makes it much harder to tune out, doze off, or have side conversations when everyone can see you.
7. Take It Easy on the Powerpoint: If Powerpoint is absolutely necessary, try to keep it to a minimum; a few slides to guide the presentation. Many presenters simply read what is on the slides line-by-line, and it is excruciating to sit through that. Think of meetings as a value-added event; they should engage the audience and promote discussion. We get to read enough sitting at our email clients.
8. Have a (Short) Schedule: Your bullet list meeting schedule shouldn’t have multiple indentations in it. A lot of times meeting planners try to insert lots of extraneous information (directions for performing a process, usernames/passwords to access databases, etc) but these pieces of information are better placed in more focused, regularly-updated documentation. Otherwise your schedule may well become the documentation.

In free-wheeling development circles, meetings have long been vilified as Dilbertesque productivity leaches. It really doesn’t have to be that way. There are many problems that can be solved much more quickly in a 10 minute meeting than in a back-and-forth email thread over 3 days. Perhaps it is due to the inherent unmeasurability of software development that management has decided to “solve” the problem with more face-to-face gatherings; obviously it would be easier to make sure nothing is going wrong if we keep on polling the developers. Whatever the reason, overuse has caused the meeting to be something of a pariah in the management toolkit, ranking somewhere slightly north of layoffs.

It isn’t difficult to make meetings more productive. Just use some common sense, empathy, and restraint, and you’re already 90% of the way there.

Til next time.

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