Let Your Software Development Happen With Minimum Meetings

How many of you have ever faced situation like you are doing something productive and manager calls for meeting. “Let’s have a meeting” is an often response for any situation in many organizations. Although scheduling meeting may be a right solution in many cases but not best fit always!

It has been observed that person takes about 15-20 minutes to get back from interruption and focus again. This means unnecessary meeting for 15 minutes will waste developer’s 30 minutes actually and this may create stress and frustration. As a project manager it’s your duty to avoid unnecessary meetings if possible & for that you need to decide whether the meeting is really necessary or not. I generally use following simple flow chart to decide whether meeting is needed or not.

Following should be quick pointers for meetings

• Check Availability: Always check availability of people, room etc. well in advance before meeting to avoid wastage of time.
• Avoid Informal Communications: Generally try to avoid informal communications during the meeting period. You can have them prior or after meeting. 
• Don’t discuss solutions: Even though meeting is the place to point out problems and issues, generally don’t spend time in finding and discussing solutions in meeting. Let concern people sit together and create solutions later. 
• Don’t go off the topic: Many times it happens the people start diverting meeting topics to something else (knowingly or unknowingly), as a facilitator it’s your job to avoid such scenarios and get back on the road
• Time: Don’t let your meetings run out of time! We all have fixed deadlines for all tasks and hence don’t let your meeting hamper them.

Understand, many times people may not want to attend meeting, just because they might be really deep into something really important e.g. some piece of code, some architectural flow design, some analysis etc. Keep in mind meetings never write code!

As explained in Agile Methodology of software development, try to conduct daily SCRUMs. 15 minutes stand-up meeting is usually enough for planning a day. You should ask 3 questions to team:

1. What happened from last daily SCRUM?
2. Are there any impediments?
3. What the team is going to handle till next daily SCRUM?

So if you are meeting oriented software project manager, it’s not bad but try to limit your meetings where they are really necessary