Undocumented Features

Meeting Needs

June 2, 2008 – 8:01 am

How many meetings do you hold or attend with more than a half-dozen people in them?  How useful are those meetings?  How many meetings do you attend where you never actually have any contribution to what’s going on?

As a project manager, you fundamentally have only four resources to manage:  Time, Money, People, and Quality.  Meetings take up both time and money in the form of man-hours, and they also take people off-task to communicate.  In the process they can either build or harm morale.

Wait, did I say four resources?  Project management is a holy trinity!  Why did I put in the fourth?!?  Because people’s attitudes, motivation, and morale are a hidden variable that can stretch the other three resource types, or they can waste them.  It is therefore arguably the most important thing you can manage.

Useful meetings bolster morale.  They give people what information they need, allow them a voice and participation, and make them feel valued.  Non-useful meetings make people sit through other people’s conversations, don’t allow them to participate, fail to communicate information of value to all of the parties involved, and make you look like you’re wasting people’s time.  As a time waster, you lose credibility, damage people’s morale, and lower your value and the value of your project in people’s eyes.

So if meetings are so important, how do you know when and how to hold ‘good’ meetings?  Here’s a general checklist:

• A working meeting, where people are going to participate and make decisions of value, can be no larger than 5-7 people as a general rule.  Three to five people who contribute value is the ideal amount.  Any more than that, and there’s too many ideas at once.  Things will fall into rhetoric, and you will lose more ground than you gain.
• A meeting to present information and ideas can be as large as needed.  These are generally known/held as presentations.  You should follow good presentation guidelines, of course, such as encouraging questions, keeping good flow, keeping the group on task, etc.  If decisions come up to be made, make note, but get the decision-makers together in a sidebar or another meeting.  Don’t waste everyone else’s time making them sit through the decision-making process unless you think that understanding the discussion behind the decision has real value.
• Project status meetings should never be more than 30 minutes.  Ever.  They should cover a status report that has already been distributed.  They should briefly cover the report contents, make sure that the report is correct, that everyone understands it, and to check to see if there’s new action items.  No more, no less.
• The above-mentioned status report should be written from one-on-one or small group meetings.  Get the right one, two, or however many people are needed to cover a small and related section of the report together and hold brief talks to update.  If the update is simple enough, a phone call or an email will do.  On average, I get invited to at least one meeting per week that could have existed as an email.  Don’t do this to people.
• If the meeting doesn’t have value to someone, don’t invite them.  If you need information from them for the meeting, go get the info beforehand. 
• As a corollary to the above rule:  If in the process of getting that information you learn that they do think the meeting has value, invite them.  That person wants to be involved- don’t shun their interest.
• Whenever possible, talk to decision-makers before a big decision-meeting.  Get consensus and share information where possible and take the temperature of who wants what.  If you can get the decision made or close to made before the formal meeting, you will save a lot of time, present a more united leadership front, and gain confidence and morale within the team.

These are just a few important things to think about when handling meetings.  A meeting is a potentially powerful way to communicate- after all, you have everyone together in one place.  At the same time, you are spending resources.  Count up the salaries in the room and you’ll see.  Make sure those resources count!

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