2006/05/25

And the daily meetings will continue until productivity improves!

We're doing a lot of daily meetings these days.  Often they're a waste of time; sometimes they're alifesaver.  I think they're primarily insurance.  You're paying an upfront daily cost to mitigate your risks due to missed communications,forgetfulness, lack of shared understanding, and lack of commitments.

Perhaps there is an optimal strategy for daily meetings thattreats them like insurance and adjusts them according to your riskforecast.  If your project is bright red, maybe you need a one hourvideo conference every day with the full team.  If you're green, maybe it's sufficient to have an optioanl 10 minute conference call.  And something in between for the vast majority of projects.   The goal would be to minimize your expected wasted time in a rational way.

Note: We of course do our level best to ensure that engineers are pulled into daily meetings only when they absolutely need to be there!  

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2 comments:

  1. dossyshiobaraMay 25, 2006 at 1:13 PM

    I've blogged about my own meeting hell recently, and Scott Adams's Dilbert recently is very apropos on the subject, too.

    Daily meetings are great, if they're short and I mean 5-10 minutes short.  Until very recently, I had twice-daily meetings for a project and each meeting ran an hour *or more*!  That's 25% of my day consumed by these meetings alone.

    It's no wonder AOL isn't getting anywhere.

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  2. panzerjohnMay 25, 2006 at 1:34 PM

    Dossy -- Yep, there's clearly a light and a dark side to daily meetings.  And 25% of the day is definitely sliding towards the dark side.

    I try to use the time productively -- did my first S5 presentation while waiting for our turn on a conference call yesterday.  It's a great tool.

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