Approaches for Effective Meetings
An interesting paradox many project teams face is that while collaboration is highly valued, collaboration often takes the form of one of the biggest time wasters—meetings. The two biggest reasons meetings become ineffective are that meeting participants forget why they are meeting (no purpose) or because they know why they are meeting but lose sight of any clear way to accomplish that purpose (no agenda).
Purpose often gets lost when meetings are perceived to be part of the approach the project team is following. This is a familiar situation in plan-driven projects where meetings get erroneously treated as milestones. It also becomes a problem for some project teams who consider themselves agile because they have standups, iteration planning meetings, and retrospectives. The teams don’t have a good grasp of why they are having these meetings, but they are doing them because “it’s agile,” and, as a result, generate complaints that there are “too many meetings.”
A quick fix to solve the problem of purpose-less meetings, regardless of the approach your team is using, is to have test-driven meetings where the group starts out the meeting by asking the question “How will we know when this meeting is successful?” at the beginning of the meeting and jointly coming up with the answer.
Jeffrey Davidson described a special case of this approach with the idea of test-driven retrospectives where he suggested making retrospectives truly effective by establishing acceptance criteria for the action(s) generated as a result of the retrospective.
The lack of an agenda often exacerbates the unknown purpose of the meeting. Even in cases where the purpose is known, if there is not at least some way of keeping the discussion moving toward that purpose, the meeting quickly becomes a huge time sink. Avi Kaye discusses three commonly suggested approaches for dealing with meetings without an agenda. Of the three suggestions, helping to create the agenda is probably the most constructive.
Regardless of which approach you use to have effective meetings, the key is to establish the reason why you are getting together and come up with the approach you are going to use to guide the discussion.
