Like I said before: don’t underestimate meetings.

Don’t underestimate the good they can do, and don’t underestimate the bad. Also, as I’ve learned over the past few weeks - don’t underestimate their ability to completely morph into something different than intended.  They are wild creature which behave on a logic that is entirely their own.  :)

I use Outlook at work for calendaring and email*. I make pretty solid use of the calendaring features of Outlook, so I send meeting invitations out to people when I know that I want to schedule time for us to meet. Now, when I think of “meetings”, I generally don’t have them in my mind as formal affairs. It’s purely a scheduling convenience - I know I can be forgetful, and I know many other developers to be the same. I want an easy way to get reminders and know where I might be spending my time on a given day.

For those formal affairs, like the dreaded Staff Meeting, they get separated as capital-M Meetings. Apparently, though, not everyone views scheduled meetings the same way - for many if it’s been scheduled (i.e., if it’s down on paper), it’s a formal affair. Something to note.

Why does this happen?

I think in this particular case, it’s purely because we’re a fairly disorganized house. Everyone kinda does their “own thing”, and rarely makes use of communication, documentation, or project management tools. It’s a sort of backlash response to an highly politicized and bureaucratic environment (government and academia can be like that).

So when something comes down the pipe making use of groupware we have available, I think the natural response from those that have hardened themselves in this wasteland of red tape is to label it as “official”. Which really translates as “Bureaucratic Meeting” - note the capital letters!

I don’t think my experience is unique.  The meme of the software IT group that combats red tape and bureaucracy has been around for as long as I can remember.  It is the dragon that cannot be slain by code alone.  But as a result, many of the people that have been in the trenches a long time become jaded and paranoid.  It would be wise for anyone in such a group to keep aware of such responses.

For me, I just gotta keep it in mind.  Now, when scheduling meetings, I

1. Schedule the meeting as before (email, Outlook, etc).
2. Fill in some details to flesh the idea out to all attending.
3. Wait for responses.
4. Completely ignore all original meeting planning in step 2.
5. …
6. profi– er, Brace for impact. It’s not gonna go the way I planned. ;)

-sean

P.S. As an aside - the current disorganized state of our department is changing… slowly. I rail like a wild-eyed prophet from atop my soapbox, and every once in a while the managerial deities see fit to grant me some rain.   It’s just my job to make sure that I now properly irrigate my fields, so maybe they’ll give me a little more.  ;)

* Before you start throwing rotten fruit, it’s because we’re in a mostly-MS house working with aspiring Managers at a College of Business. Something like MS is almost a given for business functions in this sort of “enterprise” environment. :P (The Webserver and a lot of app development are Unix, though).

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