Make meetings less awful

To a person one of the biggest complaints among professional people is the number of meetings they attend. Instead of doing the work we should do, we spent our time "talking" about doing the work. I confess it is maddening. Today, I want to discuss the bane of any professional's existence. 

Work today is so complex that it requires specialized labor to get it accomplished. Thus, only some people know all the steps to complete a simple product like a pencil. Imagine the complexity needed to build a product like a banking application. It requires technology professionals, bankers, and attorneys because the regulations surrounding banking are rigorous. The number of people working on the project could be hundreds, and the teams could be anywhere worldwide. The only way to coordinate these people is to have periodic meetings to work out problems and ensure everyone has the same sense of urgency. 

What makes meetings so tedious is that many of them seem unnecessary. A public display of information or a well-written e-mail could reduce the meeting time. Unfortunately, the larger an organization, the more difficult it is to cultivate trust between disparate parts. People ignore e-mails, and the radiation of information creates political strife in organizations. So meetings are a way in low trust organizations to coordinate work. 

Agile uses retrospectives and sprint reviews to build trust by showing how work is progressing and exposing the workers to the people paying for the project. However, it triggered waves of despair from the development community because it was an additional meeting stacked on the current garden variety. When is work supposed to get done? I am sympathetic to this criticism of agile, but my experience for the last fifteen years has shown me that simple, focused meetings with a clear agenda make it possible to get work done. Meetings which exist for the same of having meetings are wasteful.

It is why if you are having a meeting, it should have a clear agenda. A meeting should either yield a decision or feature meaningful discussion. A proper agile retrospective allows the team to choose how the team should work and discuss the best strategy to complete those goals. A daily stand-up meeting is nothing more than the team discussing the day's events and making decisions for the next. Remember that the meeting is wasteful if you are not making a decision or having a meaningful conversation. 

Meetings also act as a means to mediate office politics and covey information up and down the chain of command. Thus, if you are in a forum with these goals, consider it your job to attend these meetings so your subordinates and superiors do not have to. You are a trusted vector of information, so following the session is purposeful and allows others to get work done. Those meeting types are less wasteful because you ate attending them instead of your entire team. 

Poorly run meetings could be better but are the best way to convey information in low-rust corporate environments. Make sure meetings have clear agendas. Productive meetings feature meaningful discussions or firm decisions. Finally, the meeting you are in frees up others to ensure work gets done. 

The corporate world has too many meetings, but following these simple guidelines will make them less awful.

Until next time. 

  

Meetings Do Not Have to be Awful

This blog has covered the basics of user stories, spikes, and dependency management.  Each of these skills is necessary to be a good product owner, and scrum masters need to be familiar with them if they are going to coach their teams to success.  I believe that well-written user stories and an adequately managed backlog will make the development process smoother.  It will also make the development team deliver value to customers at a more steady pace.  However, even the best backlog and well-written stories will create questions and confusion, particularly on teams that are not co-located or segregated into silos.  It is a situation where a coach needs to step in and facilitate delivery.  

A common joke in the business world is that you can avoid a business meeting if people learned how to send comprehensible e-mails to one another.  The truth is communication by e-mail is often the least effective way to collaborate on a complex task.  Tools like Slack and Microsoft teams are popular because they provide instant gratification of text and instant messaging.  Video conferencing tools like Zoom and Google Hangouts offer the illusion of being in the same physical space to allow people to solve problems.  These collaboration tools are not perfect, but as more people work from home, these tools are necessary to enable people to work together.  

The global economy is complicated, and the systems which keep it going require more expertise than one person can acquire. Hence, meetings are a necessary evil of the contemporary business world.  Since we spend so much time in meetings, it is up to agile professionals to make sure those meetings are productive.  I wanted to share a few tips to make those meetings more bearable for everyone involved.  

First, a meeting should only include the bare minimum of people needed to decide to get work done.  It is similar to the two-pizza rule which Amazon made famous.  Thus, if you are having issues with data in a database causing errors in a restful web service when you gather people together for a meeting, have representatives from each team who can do the work attend.  Have team members work together to fix a problem collectively rather than write up a defect and have it vanish in the product backlog.  I was borrowing heavily from the notion of mob programming because of lingering problems with differing priorities.  When you bring people together and give them apparent issues to solve, it creates a focus level that allows others to solve problems. 

Next, each meeting should have a simple goal.  If the team stays focused on that goal, the team will be more productive.   For instance, if the team needs to decide, any other discussion outside of the need to make a decision is wasted.  If a meeting is necessary for information gathering and consensus, then the forum's focus is different.  Keep the goal simple and make sure everyone knows what that goal is so the team can accomplish it. 

Finally, tune out distractions and focus during the meeting.  It is difficult to ask others, so lead by example by turning on your camera, putting away your phone, and avoiding muti-tasking.  Keeping the team focused will make the meeting go by faster.  Limiting distractions will also allow the team to concentrate on the meeting's primary goal, which should be part of each meeting agenda. 

One of the vital principles of agile is that face-to-face communication is the preferred means of exchanging information.  Meetings with the bare minimum of people, a clear goal, and few distractions are ideal for this principle.  The proper facilitation of meetings will make them less awful.  It will also help break down the silos which make your organization less agile.  

Until next time.