Meetings

I’ve recent felt that my team meetings and 1-to-1s were not as productive as I would like. I’ve been thinking about how to get better value from of them.

Currently I have 1-to-1s for thirty minutes every two weeks. Initially they were one after another on Friday evening but it’s commonly known that if something goes wrong, it’s going to happen on Friday evening after three so I’ve struggled to keep to the times.

We have two team meetings, one on Tuesday morning and a follow up on Friday morning.

The reason I picked Tuesday for the main team meeting was that the business priorities for the week were set in an exec meeting on Monday evening. So the idea was to wait and give the team as much info as possible. Since we started these meetings we have adopted scrum for project planning so the priorities are now set by the business team on the Friday before the start of a sprint so now there is a little lag.

The Friday meetings often got cancelled as we either had 1-to-1s on Friday evening or were really pushing to finish a sprint and we had a sprint demo in the evening.

Yesterday I read the latest excellent post on rands entitled “A Deep Breath”. I really like his meeting schedule. So what I’m going to try is the following:

Every Monday have a fifteen minute 1-to-1 with everyone on the team. Follow this with a one hour team meeting before lunch. We will continue with our fifteen minute scrum meetings everyday at ten in the morning. On Friday we will have a thirty minute “look at what we did” meeting. If it is the end of a sprint we will hold the sprint demo otherwise we will discuss our progress during the week.