Problem: There’s no time to talk in project meetings. Wait a minute, you say. All we do in meetings is talk. We don’t make decisions and solve problems fast enough. We just talk, talk, and talk.
Actually, the usual project meeting consists primarily of the project manager going once around the table, asking each person in turn about status and forecasts. As everyone else mostly zones out, each person in turn explains and excuses, and the manager questions and cajoles. That takes so long there’s no time for team members to talk to each other to clarify specs and technical approaches and to coordinate handoff due dates. Team mates and managers then have to use email, voice mail and ad hoc offline discussions to handle their communications needs.
Solution: Allocate ten to twenty minutes of each weekly meeting for team members to talk to each other. Allow them to move around, physically or virtually, to talk in small groups of two or three or four, as they choose. The ground rule is that no one can leave the meeting, so they are available to the others. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, called this part of a meeting a flea market. You can call it a cocktail party, farmer’s market or open air time, but it works.
If you have two or more remote participants, a single conference call is not adequate. A single call doesn’t allow multiple, concurrent conversations, which is where the communication efficiency comes from. So an ordinary conference call and online meeting tools like WebEx and Live Office won’t do. Look into ProjectProOnline, a project meeting web application that provides both the necessary breakout room capability over VoIP and an extremely convenient interface for recording and viewing assignments for project teams.
Peter D. Lenn, Ph.D., formerly a rocket scientist and founder of two startups, is CEO of The Daniels Group LLC. In the last ten years, he has consulted on over one thousand software and hardware projects at high tech companies, including Applied Materials, Freescale and Intel. He served on the U.S. Army Research Council and holds MS and BS degrees from MIT and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Mechanical Engineering.
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Peter Lenn is CEO of The Daniels Group, LLC. More information is available at www.ProjectProMeetings.com. For a quick overview of ways to improve project performance, watch these three short videos: Executive Briefing, why everyone Hates Project Meetings and ProjectPro Meetings Cut Time to Market.
