Project Management Basics / Meeting Types: Upgraded Version for Trendyol System Team
As Trendyol, the more our impact area grows, the more our team expands. Therefore, every day we are in meetings with different faces on different subjects. In addition, the pandemic is adapting us to remote business life. Thus, we have to schedule meetings for problems that can be solved with one question and one answer if we are in the office. When these two factors come together, the time spent in meetings becomes the biggest problem. For a project manager, this turns into a huge challenge!
When the calendar is a cloud of dust…
We do our projects with iteration, continuous feedback, and constant communication. For this reason, it is very critical for us to follow the developments instantly. While we were in the office, we could be informed about every moment of the project by turning to our teammate sitting next to us and asking short-answer questions. Our meetings were about putting the pieces together because we were in touch during the day. While drinking coffee, a small obstacle could be solved without growing. We did not have to stay in the meeting rooms for a long time. Meeting calendars were spotless.
With pandemic, we thought we could get the answers from home with a zoom invitation. But, in the online meeting, we started talking about pumpkin pie when we gathered to buy apples. Thus, the meeting times were getting too long. As the process progressed like this, our calendars started to fill up and then overflow. So how would we effectively follow the whole process for the projects? How could we move forward without throwing a meeting every day, without having page after page conversations?
We do not recreate the world but adapt it!
For this challenge we experienced, our goal as the project team was primarily to minimize the number and duration of meetings and enable the team to work more efficiently in the projects. Because it was the first feedback, and it could be the first step of the solution. At the same time, we analyzed the team and daily routines. We detected that everyone knows different rulesets about meeting flows. As the team continued to expand, this confusion of information would continue to increase. We thought it would be more beneficial to use standards where everyone would know the same thing. Yes, there are known meeting standards. We did not recreate the world. However, standards are difficult for a team working with high dynamism. We adapt to innovation, but we want to see the data of how meeting standards gather people to a common point and more efficient meetings. We wouldn’t know until we tried.
For this reason, we focused on showing time-saving and open knowledge sharing. We organized the meeting types in all project management standards according to our projects, as in the image. We believe that each team sets its own standards. That is why we didn’t use the standards directly. We thought that quick adaptation could be achieved by applying meeting types in the calendars for each project. At this point, what was important to us was that the general flow of the meeting, its participants, and how long it would last were easy to see.
We wanted the agenda and outputs of the meetings to be more visible, easily accessible, and detailed. So now, we are sharing the agenda and notes on GitLab, which we shared from the project channels. We chose GitLab because it is a common and regular platform. Otherwise, at the follow-up meetings, technical topics and discussions could take longer than we expected when everyone searches their notes on different documents.
Before the meeting, within this document, we organized the subject and time planning in minutes and speakers by taking the general flow to the project-specific.In this way, we enable the team members to come with the right expectations to the meetings for the topics that they want to raise on the point. And we helped the team members to see the time to make a speech and manage their time more flexibly in their complicated situations.
After the meeting, we added our outputs to the existing document and shared them with the team on Gitlab. We’ve made it easy to access all meeting notes without searching in the conversation history or an installed excel. In this way, as the project team, we have created an excellent database to analyze the entire project and stay up-to-date on each other’s projects.
Five minutes after writing this to you, we will probably try to improve things and make changes. It is our dynamic! Each team creates its standard according to its dynamics. I hope that what we have done so far could reveal helpful ideas for your dynamic.
