Thursday, January 8, 2009
On Meetings
A second, and dramatically less useful abstraction The Meeting. Ah, meetings. Meetings are easier to define than tasks, and on some project teams, more frequent. As with tasks, I offer a definition:
A few words on how project managers can make meetings suck less... send out an agenda ahead of time. Put items on the agenda, with approximate times next to them, and people's names. If a person's name is on the agenda, attendance in mandatory. Otherwise, it's not. Start meetings on time, and end them early. Socialize afterward. Make announcements via email: announcements do not require low latency or high bandwidth. If there's nothing requiring low latency, and nobody needs to be shamed into completing a task, cancel the meeting. I don't do that nearly often enough.
And a few words to the programmers... don't be a jerk, not even if you really hate being in the meeting. Either come and act like a competent grown up, or show some intestinal fortitude and blow it off. If a programmer's name is on the agenda next to an unresolved item of business, one way to miss the meeting without making the project manager go insane is to resolve the item prior to the meeting, and let everyone know.
And a few words to the stakeholders who will inevitably also be in the meeting... if you want to ask a question or discuss a topic in the meeting, email the project manager and ask to have it on the agenda. The project manager can probably make sure there will be a good answer waiting in the meeting, and may be able to pose it in a way that doesn't piss off the programmers.
Lastly, ten words from Despair, Inc. about meetings that should always be in the back of everyone's mind when deciding whether to have one: none of us is as dumb as all of us.
meeting (n): a scheduled event, in which attendees follow an agendaMeetings kind of suck. I think this definition gets that point across. However, there are both social and technical reasons for them. The social reason is that many programmers dislike having to tell a group of people they haven't completed a scheduled task, which is a stupid, sucky reason to have a meeting, but there it is. The technical reason is that meetings are high-bandwidth and low latency, which is sometimes needed.
A few words on how project managers can make meetings suck less... send out an agenda ahead of time. Put items on the agenda, with approximate times next to them, and people's names. If a person's name is on the agenda, attendance in mandatory. Otherwise, it's not. Start meetings on time, and end them early. Socialize afterward. Make announcements via email: announcements do not require low latency or high bandwidth. If there's nothing requiring low latency, and nobody needs to be shamed into completing a task, cancel the meeting. I don't do that nearly often enough.
And a few words to the programmers... don't be a jerk, not even if you really hate being in the meeting. Either come and act like a competent grown up, or show some intestinal fortitude and blow it off. If a programmer's name is on the agenda next to an unresolved item of business, one way to miss the meeting without making the project manager go insane is to resolve the item prior to the meeting, and let everyone know.
And a few words to the stakeholders who will inevitably also be in the meeting... if you want to ask a question or discuss a topic in the meeting, email the project manager and ask to have it on the agenda. The project manager can probably make sure there will be a good answer waiting in the meeting, and may be able to pose it in a way that doesn't piss off the programmers.
Lastly, ten words from Despair, Inc. about meetings that should always be in the back of everyone's mind when deciding whether to have one: none of us is as dumb as all of us.
Labels: programming, project management, scheduling, software
// posted by David @ 2:52 PM 
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]