Undocumented Features

UF Postings Past: United Fronts

April 13, 2008 – 8:16 am

Here’s a trick to maintaining a strong strategy and direction for your project. Before holding major meetings, meet informally with the key decision makers involved in decisions to be made at the coming meeting. Discuss all key issues to come up at the meeting, make the preliminary decisions for each issue, and agree not to take a firm position on any new issues brought up at the meeting until you can discuss them in depth. This accomplishes several things:

1) All leaders in the project give the appearance of being of one mind and that the project is in good hands. This inspires confidence from the team

2) It insures that new issues are held on to until they can be discussed thoroughly, before public dissension is created through knee-jerk responses

3) If other staff in the meeting bring up important info about the decisions you have arrived at previously that should influence your decision, treat it as a new issue. Talk to that staff, gather your facts at that meeting. You can now take that info away, discuss it at length, and revise decisions as needed. You can always release your final decision at the next meeting, again with a united front.

4) All disputes are held behind closed doors with the minimum number of participants.

This may seem like you are leaving a lot of people out of decisions, but remember this: if your project is moving at a realistic pace, you are always making decisions with the minimum amount of people involved. A working meeting is six people or less for a reason. This is the absolute maximum number of people who can hold a reasonably short discussion about anything and reach a firm conclusion. Anything more than that is simply information transfer.

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