Missing Features

Too many meetings are a wasted effort mostly because discussions end up being circular or branching. Either way, the discussion never helps the meeting reach any goals, and thus everyone’s time is wasted.

Why bother running a good meeting? Because the old adage is true: time is money. Or maybe in the software world the adage is better written as time is bugs.

Try this little exercise to see just how expensive meetings are:

• At the next meeting you attend make a mental note of how many people are involved
• If you work at a consulting firm, calculate the hourly rate of each person and calculate the cost
• If you work at a traditional software development firm, assign two bugs per programmer and one testing document, one module technical specification and three emails per project manager or architect at the meeting

How much did your meeting cost? Was it worth what was achieved?
A 2-hour meeting with three .NET developers, a database developer, a project manager and a database architect just cost the firm 8 bug fixes, two testing documents, two technical specifications and six emails to clients.

If the team bills at $200/hour, that meeting just cost $2400. Ouch.

Meetings are expensive and most people hate them. But they shouldn’t. They hate them probably because they aren’t run well. But it isn’t hard to run a great meting, it just takes a little work… and an agenda.

Why do I need an agenda?

The whole point of a meeting is simple: to make a decision that involves more than one person. This decision might be a feature list, a schedule, an upgrade plan or a technical outline to solve a problem. Whatever you might need from the meeting, it’s still a decision.

Where does the agenda come in?

Well, in order for a meeting to come to a decision, you need to have a clear goal. Why? Because a goal makes it clear to all involved what needs to be determined by the end of the meeting, makes it easy to evaluate the success of the meeting and most importantly leads to a decision.

So where does the agenda do?

It makes the goal clear (by stating it succinctly in the agenda) and it sets a framework for writing the discussion topics so that they help attain the ultimate goal of the meeting: the decision.

The agenda clothing rule

There is no set format for an agenda and no hard and fast template that you can apply to every kind of meeting. An agenda can be a simple three item list sent to the team in an email, or a full and formal two-page agenda as a PDF attachment in an email sent to a client.

The trick to selecting an agenda format is agenda clothing rule: the format of the agenda should match the clothes of the meeting attendees.

If you are meeting with paying clients and everyone is wearing pressed pants and ties, you need a nicely formatted, formal agenda. If you are meeting with the development team wearing flip-flops and wrinkled t-shirts with trite, trendy statements, a simple email agenda will probably do just fine.

The short agenda – for the informal meeting — is usually written as part of a meeting reminder email and contains a one line goal for the meeting and a short list of 2 – 5 discussion items. Short, sweet, targeted and informal.

The long agenda — for the more formal meeting — is usually a full page PDF that contains a few parts:

1. Document title;
2. Meeting location;
3. Meeting date and time;
4. Meeting goal(s); and,
5. Topics/discussion items.

If the long agenda meeting is meant for more than an hour you probably want to include times for each discussion topic. This helps you keep topic discussions targeted and keep the meeting moving.

If you had listed 30 minutes for the current topic and time is clearly up, it becomes really easy to say “I want to respect everyone’s time, so I think we really need to move to the next topic” without offending anyone.

A long agenda should probably end with a “Next steps” topic to allow the person running the meeting to wrap-up and outline what happens now.

Topics, topics, topics

The core of any agenda are the discussion topics you outline. These should be easy to write if you have identified a goal for the meeting.

Here are a few points to keep in mind:

1. Items should be very short, less than 7 words usually (the thought process that goes into watering down a complex issue to just a few words tends to make clear the core issue that should be discussed);
2. Be as specific as possible in each topic (the more vague the topic the more vague and unhelpful the discussion will be); and,
3. Ensure that each topic helps achieve whatever goal you have outlined for the meeting.

Putting so much thought into an agenda might seem like overkill. But remember, a meeting is a lot like what you eat: what you get out of a meeting can only be as good as what you put in.

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