Searching “cartoon meetings” on the internet reflects the general sentiment: meaningless, unproductive, unnecessary. From my own experience, this reflects how poorly meetings are run. This provided the underpinnings of a sales training I partook in for a previous role. It underlined how managing expectations and communicating the goal of each meeting in a continuous way helped each meeting maintain value for its participants.
This background caused me some confusion while prepping to meeting with my project group for CS467 met to discuss team standards. It struck me as odd that we needed to define “types of meetings” as a standard. Suggested meeting types to discuss included sprint (planning, standups, review, retrospective), code design, code review. Implementing each of those would take quite a time commitment from each of the members.
Luckily, the meeting to discuss standards went well. As a group, we decided that our other responsibilities outside the classroom prevented that amount of synchronous discussion. We decided that a firm weekly meeting with a clearly defined agenda would work best to meet most of our needs. We reserved the option to set up meetings as the need arises. However, asynchronous communication served us in a more fitting matter in most cases between two members having full time jobs and one member taking a full class load.
In my opinion, the result is the best case scenario. The firm Monday meetings requires discussion of new documentation requirements and project progress. The flexibility to call meetings as needed preserves the value for each participants, as each member’s time is valued at a premium. This should allow us to avoid the meeting stigma: no meeting should be meaningless, unproductive, or unnecessary.
