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Meetings are easy. Three daily practice tips



According to the PMI , the project manager spends 90% of his time communicating with stakeholders. The purpose of such communication is to discuss and decide on a number of issues. A meeting dedicated to discussing any issues is the definition of a meeting.

Continuing the logical chain, I assume that the effective conduct of meetings is a key skill for any leader, at least in terms of frequency of use.

In December last year (2019), the Comedy Club was released with the production of “A Very Important Meeting in a Very Large Company” . My Facebook tape was full of reposts of this video with the words “look just like ours”, “the main thing is that it doesn’t work out like that again” or “doesn’t resemble anything?”. An article appeared on the habr with an analysis of the production .

Long before the Comedy club, meetings became one of the key themes of Scott Adams' popular Dilbert comic strip . This is just the case when both funny and sad at the same time.

I think not only at that time I had the rhetorical question “If everyone is aware of this problem and describes so many ways to solve it, then why is it still so relevant?”

My favorite book on this topic is “Death from the Meetings,” by Patrick Lensioni . When I read it a couple of years ago, I decided that I would definitely try to put it word for word.

Six months ago, I had such an opportunity, but I could not do without deviations from the original.

At the moment, I can say that I am satisfied with the result, so I decided to share some tips from my experience. I hope you find them useful.

So, adaptation in 3 points for every day:

Classification


View your calendar and try to assign each of your meetings to one of the groups:

  • status
  • tactical
  • strategic

Problems arise when we try to combine 2 types of meetings in one.

For example: managers are synchronized by status once a week, and then proceed to discuss issues that have accumulated. In my case, this led to the fact that the agenda wandered from week to week and there was no noticeable progress on important issues.

Visualization


Find a tool for dynamically generating agendas for tactical meetings. It can be any tool in which it is possible to create a kanban board (for example, Mirro, Trello, Asana, JIRA) it will be much easier for you if the questions are ranked by importance, and the agreements and next steps will be fixed in one place. Also do not forget to add to the agenda the issues necessary to achieve strategic goals.
For instance:I made myself a simple kanban board in Trello and asked all the participants to write down all the questions in the “Backlog” column. This led to the fact that even before the meeting, the guys could see possible topics and prepare for discussion. Initially, I asked the guys to indicate with a color on the card their satisfaction with the progress on this issue, in order to understand which of those are the most painful. Over time, we moved on to classification by urgency and importance (low / medium / high) using the same label colors.

Control


Divide tactical meetings into 2 types: a weekly meeting to discuss issues and special meetings dedicated to a specific issue. If the question seems simple to everyone, then an agreement on the algorithm for solving it and the next steps does not take more than five minutes. If it becomes clear that solving the problem requires additional elaboration and collection of information, then the person responsible for the question is appointed and the estimated time to complete the next step is fixed. With this approach, it becomes possible to discuss all issues from the agenda, as well as identify all the problem points. The main thing is that each question will have an owner who will be responsible for the implementation of the planned steps and will keep stakeholders informed of changes during meetings of the “status” type.

For instance:for questions on which “it’s clear what to do”, I started the column “status” on the same board. I use it to prepare for a short meeting on synchronization, so as not to miss the news on the steps that were planned to be taken in the interval from the last meeting.

A couple of timing tips:


Status - at least every 2 days from 5 to 15 minutes.
Tactical weekly from 45 to 90 minutes.
Tactical specials from 30 to 90 minutes.

Strategic meetings require preparation and time. It is better to carry them out of the office so that employees have no chance to be distracted by daily tasks. I spend them once a quarter and I ask you to release them all day for this event.

I tried to make the article as concise and useful as possible. I bring a number of publications from Habr in addition which, in my opinion, help to open a subject:


I will be glad to your questions and comments.

Productive meetings and have a nice day :)

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