Meeting hatred!

There's a short blog posting on the NYTimes CityRoom blog about meetings.

Meetings Post

The author absolutely *hates* meetings.
Here, take a look at this humorous poster on meetings.

Also, someone had posted this link about seeing how much meetings actually cost in real dollars (or euros, or other currencies): Meeting Timer; It's pretty cool. Just enter a few values and go! Watch the cost of your meeting add up. pretty scary!

I personally am agnostic about meetings. I've been to meetings which have been a waste of time of course. But I've been to other meetings where we've had to hash out real technical decisions and decide which way to proceed. Everyone's input was needed. A meeting is really the only way to arrive at those decisions.

Agendas are the key to having a good meeting. Know what the meeting is for: know its purpose going in. One meeting I held was because a senior member of the team didn't feel comfortable about a technical choice in the architecture that was made. The software was already tested and running fine and was a few days away from production release but this guy just didn't feel comfortable. So I held a meeting with him and a few other senior people. I quickly took everyone through the architecture, got everyone on the same page and then voiced his concern so we could all debate it. I actually thought that was a good meeting because everyone contributed and came away with an idea of what the architecture consisted of. This senior manager felt more comfortable as well. That was my primary objective actually: his acquiescence to what was going to be deployed. I didn't plan on having any action items come out of it nor did I want to address anything in the architecture that late in the game.

Project meetings where you don't come away with action items are basically a waste of time. When I am the Project Manager running meetings for my projects, I will also take on this responsibility of documenting the items. When I first started out as a PM, I didn't do this b/c I thought someone else would do it (big mistake!) just because 'someone else always did' (and it never used to be me!)

So then I started doing it. But then I realized there was a *huge* benefit for me to do this. It entitles me to become a 'revisionist' (as in revising history!). This sounds a bit dubious but it actually is quite a very useful practice. Let me explain where it come in most handy. In some meetings, there might often be those one or two stakeholders who don't have anything to do with the project itself but throw out 10 concerns: "You're going to want to check this, and then check that, but that might be ok, as long as you check this..." It's usually the case that these people are on the periphery of the project and will actually contribute no manpower whatsoever to the completion of it. They just want to be heard. (Pigs & chickens)

As PM, I believe I have license to do what it takes to get the project done. So on my action list after the meeting, I might conveniently leave out some of the suggested items that were brought up. This all depends on the exact concerns voiced or the level of influence of the stakeholders, etc. There have not been many instances where someone has emailed me back saying I missed something. And if they do, my response is to say "I'm sorry. I've added it now". Because if they do notice it's missing and actually write me about it, I'll take that as my cue that it actually is important. Life gives you the lessons when you need it the most...