Can we have a meeting? Better send me an email
I’ve heard a lot of times that question: can we have a meeting? or even we have to sit and talk about this. That kind of interaction is because the person who is requesting that needs to talk. Maybe it’s because the ideas are unclear in their mind or maybe they feel that express the same writing is a waste of time.
In my personal experience, force to someone to express what they want to request, suggest or share by email is a better way to attend their needs. On the one hand we force them to think what they want to say in a correct way. On the other hand I can read it more than once.
But even better. If the information is needed for more than one person, that could be resend without double effort to share the same thing again and again.
Another thing to keep in mind, the meetings are very dangerous. They are a great waste of time if it’s not planned correctly and all of the information is unclear. As Rework book says: meetings are toxic; avoid them as much as possible.
Getting Requirements
All of the times I was in a meeting to gather requirements from a client or colleagues I realised the meeting was not worthy because I forgot to write down a lot of things we discussed. At that time maybe that could appears as not very important.
Even if I wrote everything correctly exists the problem: I didn’t say that. That’s a big problem because you haven’t write evidence about you’re not lying.
In a less problematic way, it could be a misunderstanding solved by phone that is forgotten again and again you have to ask to the person and believe the other person has better memory than you.
The better way to work on requirements is through a ticket or card system to write all of these requirements and can work for more than one person on each one. Good platforms for them are JIRA, Trello, Asana, Fogbugz, Mantis or even the ticket part of other system like Redmine, Gitlab, Bitbucket or Github.
Stand-Ups
This is a funny way to meet all of the team to say in a nutshell what are you working on and blocks if any. No mysteries. But that’s the theory. In the practice every single person needs to say how busy they were and how much work they did and of course, the problems they have in their journey.
There are a lot of mechanisms to use to speed up your stand-up meetings to avoid to be physically standing up for the meeting. One of them is limbot:
But you can do it even without that bot. Usually is answer daily a set of questions. Most common ones are:
- What are you working on? (use only one phrase, please)
- What blocks are you experiencing?
- Have you got enough assignment to work today?
- Is what you are working on lasting more than expected?
Anyway, most of those questions maybe are out of the scope of the stand-up meeting and should be solved in a ticket (JIRA, Trello, Asana, Fogbugz, …) assigning the task to the person who is blocking it or who’s responsible to help to unblock or speed up the task.
The thing to keep in mind is make as less questions as possible. Only the most important ones.
Working Meetings
I saw in a lot of companies meetings like Architecture Design Meeting, or Security Enhancement Meeting, or whatever else. Mainly what the organisers want to achieve with that kind of meeting is a brain-storming of possible solutions and, like if this was a school team work, talk and work all together in a solution.
The worse part is the assistance to that kind of meetings. Usually there are too many people involved on them. You can count all of the assistants there calculate the average of salary for those hours they are attending that meeting and says: we lost today X hours for Y people = Z euros/dollars/pounds/…
When the meeting is kept for less than 5, then maybe there are an opportunity to waste not too much. Anyway, is a interaction with mutual exclusion (mutex), that means while others are talking or exposing the others have to wait, keep in silence and take notes or interrupt if they want to say something.
Not a good deal. Think about you want to expose an idea. You need at least 5 minutes to expose it correctly but, the people are too impatience. You’ll be fighting to achieve to finish you exposure.
Maybe it’ll take longer to have a good keynote ready. If you put all of the important information there and then small pieces of text you save your time and the others time if you send it via email and wait for feedback. Even if you write that in a collaborative platform like Google Docs, you can get even better and faster feedback to continue working.
You then can keep a meeting or talk with a colleague knowing he/she has all of the information you wanted to share.
On Remote
Working in a meeting-based way gives you a great handicap when you decide to work from home one day. You have to be online in your phone line or even worse in the video via Skype, Hangout, Bluejeans, join.me, appear.in, … Finally gives you less time to work than if you were in the office.
And even it could give the feeling to the rest of the team you’re not working if you are not in a meeting.
If you avoid to have meetings all of the time you’ll realise it’s posible once or twice a week work from home without problems because everything is online, everything is wrote it, accesible and the work could be done without problems.
Get the Work Done
It’s very important think about the difference between have a meeting to decide what is needed to be done and do those things.
In the first case, you don’t need the meeting. You need the requirements, you need the tasks, you need the specification of the work to be done. That could be given to you wrote via email, Slack, Hipchat, Hangout, or any other chat platform which let you to get all of the information from your boss or other colleagues.
In the second case, you work can be done by yourself. It’s not needed a meeting to getting it done. You can have doubts or you can make mistakes in the estimation. Maybe the requirements are changed and you need more information about the new scope. That’s not ok, but even in that situation you don’t need a meeting.
Conclusion
Define what’s your work based on. What means have your work done. What means you are working and keep in mind that because I’m completely sure that’s not keep meetings all of the day with your boss or colleagues.
Save your time as much as possible. You can take advantage of that time to work more in the important stuff. In my opinion is a win-win strategy to implement in all of the companies. No matters the size the company has.
