The Scourge of Unnecessary Meetings

As a project manager who used to be a programmer, I can remember how much I hated sitting in meetings. My train of thought was commonly along these lines; “Why am I in this meeting talking about the project when I could be coding?” Because of this, I do my best not to subject schedulers to meetings unless absolutely necessary. Obviously, not all managers come from a technical background, so this empathic understanding may not be present.

Ad-hoc meetings are a growing trend, but it’s not always convenient for three or more people to discuss the details of multiple projects in an open-plan setting. When you realize that an impromptu discussion is probably interrupting other people around you, the common suggestion is “let’s take this to the boardroom.” Now you have an ad-hoc meeting that has turned into a real thing, a meeting that can potentially turn into a long discussion.

This brings us to the topic of written agendas, some wear them out, but are they in keeping with the spirit of Agile? Having someone write an agenda is additional bureaucracy. At least for short meetings, I think agendas can be replaced by presence of mind and self-discipline. You must be able to say two things in a meeting without being seen as negative; “we’re going off track here” and “we need to move on to the next item”.

Ideally, a project manager should go to great lengths to protect meeting schedulers. If operational management goes directly to the schedulers for project status updates, then the project manager cannot do his job properly. It is not unreasonable to expect a project manager to know exactly how a project is progressing at any given time.

How does a project manager stay on top of project status? Simple, by maintaining a project schedule that developers review 1-2 times a week and update their particular sections (for example, when Jane completes validation of the registration form, she marks the task as 100% complete). Most other situations can be handled as one-on-one meetings, via email, or through MSN.

The only time all the programmers need to be in a room at the same time is when they all have to talk to each other. Senior programmers must bear an additional burden; they are commonly needed at meetings to provide technical expertise.

Development team meetings are an exception; by this I mean meetings with nothing but schedulers in them. These meetings are rarely superfluous, programmers will be eager to get back to their computers and get on with their work so as not to waste time on unnecessary business.

I hear you say “but if you keep programmers out of meetings, they won’t interact with other staff and won’t know what’s going on in other departments.” You can’t cajole a team into ‘twining’ by putting them in an artificial setting like a meeting, which is an inherently formal situation anyway.

You’re more likely to develop a sense of internal community by hosting events that are obviously social gatherings (for example, everyone leaves the office at 4:30 pm for pizza and bowling). Another way is to provide a nicely furnished communal dining room where people can sit and chat during their lunch hour.

I’ve seen it suggested that coders respond to project status queries by saying something like; “it’s in the buglog”, or “it’s on the wiki”, or “I emailed you about it”. Even assuming that a manager understood the reasoning behind such a statement, it’s still a bit rude at best and politically insensitive. Perhaps a better version would be “I’m happy to meet with you to discuss it, but it’s in the buglog. And to be honest, I’d rather code so we can deliver it sooner.” Would such a statement work? Who knows, but at least it wouldn’t seem negative.

The use of MSN as a communication tool is a potentially heated topic of debate. Some companies ban it outright, others adopt it and reap the benefits. I was in a company where everyone had it on their machines and it worked great.

Is it true that sending a message like “can I talk to you when you’re free?” to a person sitting three feet away it feels a little weird. However, walking in and interrupting them in the middle of a task is likely to disrupt their train of thought or annoy others sitting nearby. There is a degree of “knowing what a person likes” here, if you know a person prefers emails, send them emails, if a person prefers face-to-face discussions, so be it, adjust it.

At the risk of being funny, I would say that programmers love MSN. This is because it offers a degree of control. An instant message can go unanswered for a few minutes and doesn’t break concentration the way verbal interruptions do. I would say that MSN is more suitable for specific questions like “will the file upload feature be ready today?” instead of vague queries like “how’s the project going?”

MSN is also great for giving simple instructions like “a friendly reminder Tom, I need you to go to the project schedule today and update your areas” or “the client has logged some bugs, I assigned them to you, go fetch when you’re ready.”

The main danger administrators see in allowing programmers to have MSN installed on their computer is that they will talk to their friends; and they will, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad. Personally, I spend about 20 minutes a day talking to friends on MSN (eg “did you go for a walk at the weekend?” etc.). The problem is when the amount of time spent on MSN becomes excessive (eg more than 2 hours), but this is a matter of self-discipline and only occasionally affects some developers.

Now we come to one of the most disturbing causes of unnecessary meetings, those that have been called for the sole purpose of stroking a manager’s ego (note: this may be on a subconscious level). Tom DeMarco at Peopleware calls these ‘status meetings’; not because it’s about getting the latest status on a project, but because it’s about asserting the ‘boss’ status of the boss within the organization. There may be little that can be done about this situation, after all, they are the boss, right?

I’ve seen a company where the CEO had weekly meetings that lasted an hour. During each meeting, he mainly spoke to the people. The programmers said about four or five words in total during the meeting, this was a good indicator that they didn’t need to be there.

The bottom line is that meetings are here to stay, including unnecessary ones. This is simply a product of a corporate environment, managers are social beasts who like to talk, programmers are technical beings who like to code.

I’ve seen programmers suggest other approaches to alleviate the plague of unnecessary meetings. For example; require an agenda before accepting the meeting request, insist that off-topic topics be discussed at another time, keep track of time spent in meetings to use as ‘evidence against your boss’ when projects fail, etc. All idealistic and pragmatic, but unfortunately as long as the balance of power remains with managers, the bias will remain towards verbal communication.