Make Meetings Useful
I’ve commented once or twice on meetings - and I’m not alone. The folks over at Signal vs. Noise have commented yet again with tips on making them useful. I’m certainly not against meetings - they have their place. However, I’ve been in far too many meetings that were a) far too long, b) had no agenda and c) involved FAR too many people. Sometimes meetings need to involve a large cross section of the population of Cleveland…but not very often. And what’s the deal with meetings that don’t result in action items? I mean, c’mon, if we just spent the last 60 minutes discussing today’s great problem, there aught to be some action items (just not for me). Sigh. It could be worse, I could be a manager.
February 8th, 2006 at 7:44 pm
[…] A while back, I wrote about two of the most dangerous words in the programing world - what if. Like many before me, I’ve been on teams that were stuck in analysis paralysis before and I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve attended that quickly devolved when people started tossing out loaded phrases like “well, I could see a customer doing…” or “you know, I think it’d be nice if…” Hey, I’ve been guilty of gold plating from time to time, but I’ve grown - I fully accept YAGNI in my life. Now, along with a blood sacrifice, I demand living breathing proof that we need to implement a feature…who am I kidding, I don’t have that kind of clout. […]
April 2nd, 2006 at 12:23 pm
[…] I’ve written about meetings on more than one occasion (here, here, and here) but I recently ran into a very interesting article by Jared Spool called The One-Minute Test. Jared describes a technique his team uses at the end of meetings to make sure that everyone is on the same page. Given a 60 second time limit, every participant is asked to write down their answers to the following questions: […]