Meetings and Urgency

Daily Sprint Meeting (Creative Commons)

We are all in the business of getting things done and meetings are an important part of that goal. They are the key opportunity for people with similar interests to make decisions and move the ball forward. Regularly scheduled staff meetings though are different, and most people misinterpret the goals of these meetings.

Often teams attempt to get urgent work done in regularly scheduled meetings, but that is a mistake. Getting anything done requires a sense of urgency and it is harder to create that in a fixed staff meeting. Staff meetings are good for information sharing and identifying hot spots that are ready for a sense of urgency.

This means that staff meetings should be short with set agendas and slanted toward getting information shared across the group. It further indicates that anything which needs a sense of urgency (most everything else) should be done in separate meetings that have attendees capable of focusing on the issue at hand and making fast decisions.

Here's an example agenda from a staff meeting:

Attendees: Dave, John, Mary, Jeff, Janet, George
Agenda:

• Holidays coming. Yeah!
• Operations prep and rehearsals for holiday
• Finished make production work project
• Deployment
• Move to 3rd pty. hosted cloud
• Security
• Improved customer experience
• Improved attitude of do things completely and right (need to keep this)
• Deploy to beta each sprint
• Round table - Dave(Setup), John(Control), Mary (Deployment), Jeff (WebOps), Janet(Architecture)

Action Items:

Description	Owner	Status/Date
Ask Janet to send her report more broadly.	George	Done

Here's an example of an agenda from an urgent ad-hoc meeting. The attendees and action items are not in this one to save space:

Agenda:

• Is experience design catching up as per the plan?
• Are the wireframes becoming available?
• When will control and setup be integrated? Is that on track?
• What does the build system look like today?
• Has build and source control been handed off to the build team? When?
• What is our unit test coverage?
• How is regression test going?
• Are all the pieces coming together?
• When will beta deployments begin?