Meeting Management/Planning

Today

• Go over basics of meeting management• Introduce key elements of creating a plan

Why Have Meetings?

What are the reasons for having meetings?

Issues

What common issues are experienced?– Wastes time

• Expensive (duration * # of attendees)

– Ill focused• Not clear what the purpose is• Not clear what the desired outcome is

– Goes off track• Is sidetracked by discussions that don’t support objectives

– No follow up• Not clear what happens after the meeting• People lose track of decisions/issues from meeting

Results of Poor Meeting Management

• Personal issues can arise• Team can become demoralized• Schedule delays

Effective Meetings

• First why are you meeting?• Meetings need to be planned• Ensure appropriate participation• Make sure the meeting stays focused• Record decisions, issues, and actions• Make sure all understand the results• Have some effective mechanism for following

up on the results of the meeting

Why Are You Meeting?

• What is the purpose of the meeting?• Do you really need a meeting?• All meetings should have a clear objective

(should be clear to all attendees) e.g.– Status– Planning– Review (e.g. postmortem)– Working meeting of some type• Should have specific (reasonable) objectives

Planning a Meeting

• The meeting should be structured and conducted to support the goal

• To do this you should “plan” the meeting• Everyone should know and understand the “plan”• People should have a chance to comment on the plan prior to

the meeting• Pre work should be explicitly identified• And should be done prior to the meeting

• Key participation should be confirmed– Doesn’t make sense to meet if you don’t have the people

needed to accomplish goals

Keep Meeting Focused

• The meeting should stay on topic and be efficient• You should have some means for making sure

the discussion doesn’t go off track – E.g. if you have a status meeting it is often easy to

start talking about solutions for identified issues• Helpful to have someone responsible for making

sure you stay on topic– Could also have someone keep track of the time

• May need to time box discussions

What Did We Talk About?

• It’s great if you do some great thinking but …– If no one remembers what was decided what good is it?

• Need to have some way to capture the results of the meeting– Typical output are:

• Action items• Issues/Risks• Decisions

• It is helpful if there is someone who is responsible for capturing these outputs

Did We Accomplish Our Goal?

• It may be useful to review outputs of the meeting at the end– Helps to ensure all understand the decisions

consistently• It can also be helpful to reflect on the

effectiveness of the meeting– Many ways to do this– Can help ensure that the meeting process

supports objectives

So Now What?

• What happens after the meeting?• Is it clear?• How are the decisions/risks/actions

communicated?• How are the results tracked?• Helps to have (at a minimum) minutes

published

Realization Varies

• How you incorporate meetings into your process will vary widely

• Should have some means for making sure the meeting is effective

• Will require that you have integrated processes– This is true across the board

Planning

• What is a plan?• Why do you need one … or do you need one?• What does a plan consist of?

Past (Common) Issues • It isn’t clear what is being planned

– The plan doesn’t reflect the needs of the project– Often we’ll see “semester” plans

• Plan isn’t created because teams don’t know everything yet• Multiple plans

– We often see “Macro” plans and “iteration” plans• Plans are static

– Teams create a plan early and don’t update– Initial plan isn’t accurate or detailed

• Plan isn’t adequately communicated– The plan is only used by the project manager

• Tasks are commonly understood• Relationships among tasks aren’t clear or commonly understood

Creating the Plan

• What is the plan for?• What are the tasks for each deliverable?• How are the tasks related?• How much effort is required for tasks?• What will be done when?• How will the plan be recorded and tracked?• How and when will the plan be updated?

What Is the Plan For?

• What are the results of the activity being planned?– What are the goals of the project?

• What are the deliverables?– Be sure to consider all deliverables– Remember you have three main “recipients” the client,

the Academic program, and yourselves • As knowledge of these deliverables are refined the

plan will likely need to be refined• The resulting plan should support the goals

Tasks? What Tasks?

• You (as a team) will need to do some finite set of activities to realize the deliverables

• What are these activities?– They may come from risks and process as well as deliverables

• You will not be able to identify all of them upfront– They may also be high level initially

• It (somehow) needs to be clear what these tasks are– At least when they are going to be estimated, assigned, and

performed• How much effort is needed to complete the task?

– Needed for scheduling– Needed for work allocation

Tasks are Related

• Tasks are related– Tasks often depend on each other in some way

• Tasks may constrain each other– Decisions made with one task may constrain the

available options for another task• You must therefore understand these relationships– Impacts how you are going to stage the work– Impacts the interactions among people working on

related tasks– Impacts how re-planning happens

Scheduling Tasks

• You need to create a schedule for the tasks• Your lifecycle process will impact this• You need to consider:– Available resources– Fixed deliverable dates (e.g. MPP)– Task dependencies– Vacations, holidays, other non-working time

Recording and Tracking

• In order for the plan to be effective it needs to be communicated– An excel spreadsheet on the PM computer

probably isn’t the best approach• You need to have some mechanism for

recording, communicating and tracking the plan– Some combination of tool and process

Plans Are Dynamic

• Things change• Your initial plan will be inaccurate/inadequate• When will you update the plan?– At what point might you have enough information

to refine previous assumptions?• How do you know if your plan is working?• Do you have some means for updating your

planning process?

Resources

• Mentors• In house experts– Mel Rosso-llopart– Eduardo Miranda

• Courses – Managing Software Development– Estimation course– Team Software Process

• And of course– Online and print resources