Important meetings: Ensuring that agenda and main meeting points are circulated and clear before the meeting - Part 2

The previous post of this series (Ensuring that agenda and main meetings are circulated and clear - Part 1), talked about a meeting where we had a number of people, was an important meeting with a number of items to be discussed, and the meeting was a disaster. Items were discussed, but the meeting did not run on expected lines, most of the items were not discussed, and it turned out to be chaotic to some degree. Since the meeting did not accomplish what we had wanted to get done, and we had got some feedback about the meeting (not positive, certainly not), we set out to see what all we had been doing wrong and wanted to improve things to a great degree.
So, here are some of the things we did to improve the way we ran our meetings:
- We did a listing of the items we had where we needed information (or needed to have a discussion) with the required attendees of the meeting. This included a prioritization of these items; it was something as simple as figuring out the items that we could drop from the discussion list of we were pressed for time.
- Out of the items that we had for discussion, we tried to get a listing of such items that needed information from only one person (rather than a discussion with multiple people) and tried to get that information before the meeting. This ensured that the meeting did not waste time of most of the people who were there for the meeting.
- With the items that we had, we did a round of internal discussion related to the assumptions and the variables involved with each item, and where necessary, we consolidated the information including preparing diagrams and workflows that would help show the current situation, and show the areas where we needed the information. This would help focus the discussion and reach conclusions faster (and also remove the tendency for somebody to start tracing a situation from the beginning).
- For each item, we would have a specific person from our side who was the expert (this ensured that we did not have several people from our side trying to speak on the same issue), and this person was supposed to ensure that they set the pace of the discussion and stopped where it got out of context (see the next point)
- Sometimes conversations would tend to get out of context, and this would waste a lot of time. If you would have seen discussions of meeting, you would have seen somebody come up with the following line: "Folks, if we could get back to the subject on hand". We ensured that for every point, there would be somebody from our side who would do this, evaluating when a subject had been discussed enough or was getting out of context.
- Similar to the above point, we had set aside time for each subject, and had a buffer of 15% extra time. When we reached to around 90% of allocated time for a subject, we would try to consolidate and do a summary of the discussion, and then ensure that we were finishing the subject within the allocated time.
- We sent out an agenda with the current status and the query on which we were hoping for a conclusion, and ensured that everybody had read the agenda before the meeting. We did a call to all the attendees, so that they had read the agenda and also confirmed their attendance to the meeting.
- We sent out clear directions to the location of the meeting, including sending out conference details if the meeting was remote for certain attendees, and also details of any online white board for discussions.
With all these, the next meeting was a fairly decent success; we did not get everything discussed, but a number of items that we had for discussion came up and we got resolution to a number of items, It also ensured that a follow up meeting inspired more confidence among the attendees.

Important meetings: Ensuring that agenda and main meeting points are circulated and clear before the meeting - Part 1

If you are working for a small self-contained team, then this is not a problem that you will probably run into. However, if you are working for a product which is large and complex (consider some of the products made by large companies such as Intuit, Adobe, Microsoft, or Apple), then a typical product will have a lot of complexity. There will be components made by other teams that are critical (for example, if you consider MS Word, the Online Help system would have been prepared by another team, and the team working on Word would have integrated this system rather than try to make it themselves). Another example would be that of the multiple products made by Microsoft and Adobe. The part of the application dealing with serial number, anti-piracy and similar functionality would be common to a company, and individual applications would be just integrating these components. There can be different levels of complexity, and in some cases, this complexity can be pretty high and critical.
As a result of all this, there needs to be regular discussions between a team and the various components on which it is dependent in order to ensure that there is agreement on the inter-dependencies such as features, requirements, and schedule. When all this is going on smoothly, then the project manager can rest easy and not have to worry too much.
However, life is not so simple. There will be often enough times when there is some dependency that is proving to be a problem (the schedule is not working out right, or there are some new requirements that need to be communicated and agreement obtained on getting those implemented, or about the level of quality required, or about who will do the detailed testing, and so on). For all these items, sometimes discussions over email can work, but it can be difficult sometimes, and email can turn out to be more problematic, and it is probably easier to just do a meeting with all the stakeholders.
But, and this is the part that can get tricky, a meeting with multiple stakeholders can get tricky unless it has been planned. In one case, we had people calling into the meeting from 4 different geographical locations, and it was difficult to get the meeting rolling and on course. The discussion was chaotic, with multiple people jumping in, a topic being discussed multiple times, and so on. At the end of the meeting, we got maybe 10% of the required work done, and a lot of feedback about how the meeting really did not work all that well. Due to this kind of situation, not only was progress not made, but it got more difficult to call such a meeting the next time (with people using different reasons for dropping out, and one of them confiding that they felt that this kind of meeting was a waste of time, and could avoid the meeting, so that he can provide the required information later).
We did do the meeting later, but it took a different approach to ensure that the meeting was a success and got everything required from such a meeting done. Also, unfortunately, we had to do a bit of escalation to ensure that everybody did attend the second meeting, but escalation is not something that you can do every time, and if you are not getting things right, it will be very difficult the next time.
I will write more about what we did to change the planning for the next meeting in the next post (Ensuring that agenda and main meeting points are clear before the meeting - Part 2)