1. End the meeting at 5 minutes before the hour. Most people have another meeting starting on the hour, and this gives them a shot at transportation and bio-break time.
2. Ask people to turn off phones, laptops, etc directly. If I’m teaching a workshop, I cannot know if the person doing email or texting is making the right decision. I don’t bother to ask. I have asked people to move out of the way if their equipment is in the way of the people working on the simulations. If you are in a meeting and someone else’s behavior is bugging you, talk to that person directly.
3. Keep a parking lot of issues to get back to, and get back to them.
4. Track ongoing action items. Especially if you’re dealing with managers who have too many context switches to enumerate, make it easy for them to see all their action items in one place.

I have a few other rants on other workplace etiquette, such as cell phone conversations in the bathroom (Please, put the phone down. Shut it. Don’t forget to wash your hands when you’re done. Ugh).

Many of my rules arise from the idea that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

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Maybe they went to the resort to do strategic planning. An off-site is good, as well as leaving behind laptops, pagers, pdas, everything that can interrupt you. Keep the tools, leave the interruptions. If your business has changed or needs to change, as I would hope it does after being rescued from bankruptcy, you do need to do strategic planning.

Here are the strategic planning steps:

1. Define your mission. (Why are you in business? Who do you serve? What benefits do you provide?)
2. Analyze the current situation
3. Define the plans for the new situation

There are lots of ways to do the analysis and planning. SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a common way because it’s easy to see and easy to do wrong. Armstrong has a different approach: Seeking commitment as you specify objectives; generate strategies; evaluate strategies; monitor results. Armstrong’s approach appeals to me because it’s an iterative process, not something you do once while at a nice resort. There are other approaches also.

One of the best ways to do strategic planning is to do it constantly. No, not to take off-sites constantly, but to devote a little of your time each week to reviewing the mission, analyzing the situation, and see if you need to redefine your current plans. Of course, for that to work, you need data about sales (or the equivalent if you work in IT or a non-profit), where your projects are, and if you are truly serving your chosen customers. Then, once a month, maybe at the project portfolio evaluation meeting, you can review the strategy.

You might still need to do an offsite once a year. But not a really ritzy resort, where the booze, the golf, and spa treatments take you away from the business at hand. (Manicures and pedicures are not necessary for strategic planning.) Strategic planning is work. Hard work. Don’t treat it like it’s a day at the beach.

Full disclosure: Yes, I facilitate strategic planning meetings. They don’t look like the AIG meeting.

P.S. I forgot to point to the Armstrong paper: The Value of Formal Planning for Strategic Decisions: Review of Empirical Research

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For many managers (and senior technical leads), meetings are their work-in-process (in addition to their email). But what happens at these meetings? Too many senior people are doing something else at these meetings. Even assuming the meetings are well-run (not needing buckets to keep people focused, as in Why Does a Meeting Need Buckets?), sometimes the senior people are still not paying attention. One cause of that lack of attention is too many projects needing some sort of management attention.

I suggested a card technique similar to Joe’s to one of my clients. He could list all the projects down the side of the card, and the number of meetings he had each week for each of those projects–just making a tick mark. He had to count the number of hallway conversations, email threads, and formal meetings. At the end of the week, he had learned several facts:

• He had more projects than he thought he had.
• He had two projects where one asked him anything.
• He had several projects where people interrupted him almost constantly.

What’s fascinating is the conclusions he drew from this data. He thought the two projects that didn’t ask him to make any decisions were not successful–but the opposite was true. Those were the only two projects making progress out of the 30-something projects. The projects that asked him the most questions made the least progress, in terms of finished features per unit time. (These conclusions may not be yours–this is context dependent.)

So, one of the issues in managing the portfolio is that some managers avoid actively managing the portfolio, because they would have to commit their time to fewer projects. If they have to commit their decision-making to fewer projects, the goodness/usefulness of their decisions becomes more obvious. For many managers, that is a Bad Thing–because they don’t have ways to gauge how good their decisions are.

But a funny thing happens when managers have fewer decisions to make. In my experience, the quality of their decisions go up, because they are not so distracted by all the decisions, and by getting confused about which decision is which. (I need to find a reference for this–does anyone have one?) Not only are their decisions better, they can see feedback on their decisions, which improves their next similar decision. This effect is similar to technical staff estimating fewer tasks and becoming better estimators because they get much more immediate feedback on their estimates.

Managers will still be wrong sometimes. Managers don’t have crystal balls. And those times might hurt a lot. But having more output in the form of more finished work can save a manager who makes a wrong decision. The more finished work, the more flexibility the organization has in releasing a product.

So, if you’re a manager, get an index card. Write all the projects down one side (you might have to turn the card to portrait orientation). Write a tick mark next to all the projects you need to make decisions for in a week. At the end of the week ask yourself these questions:

• Should this project be in the current portfolio of staffed work?
• If so, should it have the same relative priority?
• If not, what do I need to do, to remove it from the current portfolio or raise/lower its priority?

Then do that. Yeah, easier said than done. The more decisions you have, the more fractured they are, and the less context you have to make good decisions. A more lean approach will help.

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I asked what he discussed at his meetings. “Oh, what everyone is doing.” How long are the meetings? “One to two hours.” Oh my. There is a better way.

I told him to cancel his next meeting and conduct one-on-ones with his managers instead if he needed to see status. I also told him it was worth deciding which problems he would try to solve in a group meeting. He’s got too many managers, so he can’t address everyone’s problems in one meeting–and shouldn’t. He needs to have meetings with the relevant people, make sure people discuss and develop an action plan with action items.

If you’re in a similar pickle, thinking you need status meetings, you can reset that thinking right now. Status meetings are not meetings; they are rituals. If your attendees would prefer your ritual meetings with doughnuts or wine or their laptops or cell phones or something else that distracts them from your meeting, it’s time to reconstitute your meeting.

Make your meetings events to solve problems and assign next steps. When you have meetings like that, you do not need buckets at the door. You’ll get done faster, which will help people get to their next meeting on time. (For more information, see chapter 10 in Manage It!, called “Managing Meetings.”)

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Esther and I were teaching a Behind Closed Doors tutorial at Better Software yesterday. One of the participants was a program manager. He couldn’t see the value of the standup meetings the Scrum teams used every day. “They talk to each other all the time–why do they need the standup? I can’t see the value.”

That’s because the standup has little or no value for a program manager. The value is all for the team. The standup is where the team recommits to each other–every day. The standup is where the team can build burnup or burndown charts (with virtually no overhead). The standup provides the team, not just the Scrum Master, with early warning signs the project is stalled (e.g. if someone consistently misses deliverable dates, or if related features were mis-sized).

The standup is too granular a level for the program manager. (Especially if the program manager really is managing several interconnected projects or several releases.) I asked the program manager if he received the data he needed from the team–and he did. He wanted to save the team the less than 15 minutes a day they spent on their Scrum. I suggested he stop going to the standups altogether. Less than 15 minutes a day is a small price to pay for receiving early-early warning signs of project problems.

If you’re attending standups, and you’re not part of the product development team–the people developing the product– are you receiving any information you really need? If you stopped attending, what would happen to the project? (Hint: it might go faster, because no one will be inhibited by your attendance. The team will discover problems earlier and fix them earlier.)

Labels: meeting, project team, Scrum

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