Never underestimate meetings, good or bad.

I write this referring both to their ability to hinder one’s ability to get things done and their effectiveness as communication tools.

I know writing that there really is value in the dreaded managerial meetings will make me unpopular with the developer crowd (ya can’t please everyone, I guess…), but I really do think they are useful tools for the arsenal of project managment. To get everyone in a group on the same page and pulling in the same direction, well, it’s one of the best approaches. There’s a reason they’re used so much (even if they’re abused sometimes)!

Why? It has the same usefulness of other bulk-communications (email, for example), with the added benefits of face-to-face communication and immediate feedback / discussion. It allows for immediate clarification to the group at large with less iteration, quick delivery of information, and less chance of misunderstanding (since people can pick up on emotional tone, body language, etc.). Brainstorming is almost always better in a group, and multiple eyes & ears poking at a solution tends to reinforce it more.

For those regularly-scheduled “staff-meeting” type of gatherings, despised as they are, they’re great for cross-pollination of people and ideas. If the meetings are just a droning of “…we fixed this problem, then this happened… here’s where we are now. *yawn*”, then sure, it will mostly be a time for people to get together and zone out for a while. But if it’s kept to a quick pace of briefly what’s going on, you might get opinions from other people in your department / group / organization that might not be solicited otherwise. Sometimes you might spontaneously find out about expertise or experience possessed by teammates that you’ve never known about before… more resources or guides! In most cases, this kind of communication can only help shore up a project or approach.

Of course, more is not always better with meetings… and it’s for this reason that I devoted so little time to blogging and the WPMU-LDAP plugin this week. :)

Too may meetings make my brain hurt, especially if they’re just for bureaucratic reasons. I’m definitely not alone in this. Meetings can be a huge time sink for everyone involved, and that shouldn’t be forgotten. It’s more than just the hour that’s scheduled in your calendar, too – there’s prep for meetings (e.g., mental checklists for discussion or the normal preparation of a presentation), and there’s often followup, too. People might stick around to freeform discuss afterward (often a good thing for developers!), and take far longer than originally scheduled. It’s not always as small a commitment as one might think for such a meeting.

And of course, the cost and benefit of meetings is always tied to so many other factors, especially “people” factors, so I can’t really give generalized advice that always applies. There’s always exceptions to this sort of thing… so, YMMV.

I’ve just found that whatever I expect from them, meetings are generally a bit more costly and beneficial than first anticipated… and it’s worth being sensitive to that.

-sean