Quality Design Review

by Carl Angotti, Managing Director

This paper discusses the value of periodic review meetings for a project and how to make these meetings effective. When there is an insufficient number of such meetings, it can seriously impact a project's effectiveness. On the other hand, just having a rote meeting can be as bad as not having a meeting at all, since it can demotivate the team.

Why Hold Status Reviews?

Every project of duration over a few weeks needs to have review meetings involving the manager and critical resource persons. This eliminates the communications problem attendant with the belief that "everybody already knows what is going on". Often team members do not know because they are busy on project tasks.

Rarely are written reports, or emails alone adequate to the task of assessing status for the team. With todays geographically dispersed teams, the problem has become even more complex, because meetings are not held in-person as was the case in the past.

Status meetings include those meetings that are held periodically to determine what is happening referenced to the formal project plan. This is one of the major product development project metrics.

Status meetings provide the following project advantages:

1. Allowing for "instant interaction" among the team members
2. Assessment of what has been accomplished to date and comparison to the planned activity
3. Assessment of current problems areas with quick feedback.
4. Assessing project risk areas with quick feedback
5. Communicating critical project information, with quick feedback

What Types of Review Meetings Are Needed?

Status review meetings come in two flavors: those held regularly in time, and those held to meet formal milestone reviews.

Periodic Meetings

The project plan should contain periodic meetings for status held at intervals of every one to two weeks. Two weeks is the longest practical time between such meetings. These are the regular team meetings.

Milestone Meetings

These meetings show up on plans, and often are longer, and more formal than the periodic meetings. In this case, they are also part of the formal plan metrics. As such, these meetings almost always have "hard deliverables". This can include formal documentation or demonstrations directly related and critical to the project. Because of their formality, the hard deliverables are often are the only subject of the meeting. A missed milestone is almost always a sign of a delayed project.

In Person vs Virtual Meetings

In recent times, there has been a great concern that has popped up in that teams are becoming increasingly geographically dispersed in different physical areas of the company at other locations. “Meetings are boring, a waste of time and useless.” Teams members can involve less traditional persons such as outside vendors and other groups scattered throughout the US and the world. This can exacerbate all the problems normally encountered with in-person meetings. As such, it is even more critical to focus on having high quality meetings. Everything that makes in-person meetings work better, is even more critical to make virtual meetings work well.

For planning, remember to keep in mind the array of media that are available for meetings from the inherently most effective to least effective for status review.

1. In-person Meetings

   By far the most effective.

2. Video Conferencing

   Experience has shown little improvement over web -based or telephone conference meetings in most instances.

3. Web-based Meetings

   Sometimes the actual technology can get in the way of the meeting, but they can definitely be better than a telephone conference after a learning curve. These meetings must include phone calls along with the use of the web based tool.

4. Telephone Conference Meetings

   These can work surprisingly well, if good meeting principles are adhered to.

   For added enhancement, use chat rooms with file sharing capacity (e.g., AIM, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, etc.)

5. Chat Room Conferences

   These are relatively new approaches. Experiment with using the best of them, ie, those that allow for file sharing, are showing some real promise.

6. E-Group Based Meetings

   These could also add significant effectiveness over the much poorer “standard” email approach.

7. Plain Old Email

   This doesn't constitute an appropriate medium, since there is a long, unknown, delay in the feedback among the parties. Unfortunately sometimes, this is the only method that is available for some team members. In this case, agreements on response turn around times are a must. There also needs to be a method to automatically collect the message threads. These methods are beyond the scope of this newsletter.

Why don't Good Status Meetings Occur in Practise?

If these meetings are so important, why are they so often not held, or when they are held, why are they so ineffective? Often the attendance is either sporadic, or some critical members don't attend. There are also frequent complaints from the team members.

These complaints can be summarized as:

1. The meetings are boring, a waste of time and useless.

2. Specific members say they don't need to be at this meeting, and it's wasting their time. These comments often translate into "Let me get the real work done by not being here". Sometimes such comments may adequately describe a sequence of status meetings, or they may come from people who aren't convinced of the value of such meetings as a matter of principle.

   This can even be true of management team members. Such team members truly believe their time is much more valuable being used elsewhere.

3. Team members ask "Why are we here, and why are there so many meetings"?

4. Team members complain that these meetings are too long, and often off track

There are two other factors that are often unspoken about why team status meetings are so maligned:

1. A fear that the truth of the "real" status might come out and be exposed to the Project Manager, or worse, upper management. This occurs when reporting is not aligned with the actual facts being presented.
2. Members are tired of being "brow beaten" and always hearing bad news due to missed schedule deadlines and cost overruns.

Some Solutions to Meeting Ineffectiveness

1. Communications Plans From the beginning, create expectations that all members are part of the team and expected to communicate with the other team members. A communications plan formalizes this information flow. Such plans outline who will attend the various level meetings, and how the others that don't attend will receive the output summaries of the meeting. This allows planning for the way information will flow around, and be gathered as the project progresses. Because of this, some persons can attend meetings "on call", while others only attend specific level meetings. This can help the meeting "boring" and time factor complaints to be reduced.
2. Help with Meetings That Are Too Long Meetings should be as short as possible - but not too short. Often, half an hour will do as an initial target for status meetings. A milestone review commonly takes four hours. “Feed Them and They Will Come.”These are rarely thought of as too long. There is a common idea that "standing" meetings (ie where participants stand during the meeting) seem to run shorter than sitting meetings.

   The challenge is to avoid meetings that cover too much territory, or that focus too long on subjects that are not of general interest. The goal is to allow as many members as possible to contribute to the meeting as time allows. Absent this goal, the feeling of boredom and frustration is often created.

3. Keeping Meetings Moving Along There are a number of factors that keep meetings moving along and create the sense of a fruitful meeting.

   These include:

   1. Having a written, pre-published Agenda, definitely helps to keep meetings moving along at a brisk pace.

   2. Having material to be discussed during the meeting made available beforehand, so it can be reviewed before the meeting.

      To help in this process, include templates for reports to be presented, action items lists, and the use of red, yellow and green to mark status of various action items or risk areas to focus attention.

   3. Using effective facilitation skills to really aid in keeping meetings moving along. This is a skill that can be learned, and the team leader should learn and exercise it when it really makes sense to do so. Good facilitation often makes use of Ground Rules that are established by the team, and that are truly respected by all.

   One of the most challenging aspects of facilitations is interceding in the meeting process to interrupt side conversations, or side tracked conversations. It is especially difficult to keep side technical discussions to a minimum. The facilitators skill at moving these discussions to another venue can be very valuable.

4. Make Action Items Lists These can be very powerful in making meetings meaningful, and getting tasks accomplished between meetings. There are a number of good methods to make these useful. See the document at "Template for Action Items List" for a good example.

   Action Items should always be published as soon as possible after the meeting has ended.

5. Strive to Avoid Boredom Some experienced team members really have learned to make meetings fun, to avoid the boredom factor. This depends on the creativity of the facilitator.

   Some ideas: Tell a "Joke of the Day", use symbols like ducks that are lined up on a schedule that show the team "getting its ducks in a row". Use balloons with sayings to reward good team performance. This can be tricky, because it can backfire, but used properly, it can be very effective.

6. Encourage Positive Attitudes and Regular Attendance. Pay team members a visit to discuss their meeting concerns with them. Ideally, all team members should participate in every meeting, but is this always a hard and fast rule?

   Maybe some persons really don't need to attend all of the formal meetings. Perhaps they can generate written reports, or send proxies or both. Find out what would make a meeting interesting to them, and if it makes sense to accommodate them.

7. Feed Them and They Will Come. This maxim has been used to gather people for centuries. Use of this method has been known to significantly improve meeting attendance.

   Human beings are much less likely to judge meetings negatively if good food is provided, attendees are also much more likely to be prompt.

Questions Regarding Team Meetings

The preceding description of effective team meetings is a very short presentation of how to improve status meetings on a real project. If you have any questions, or need clarification of the material presented, please contact us at cangotti@360strategicpartners.com.

This paper and the material it links to are published with permission of the authors.  All rights to these materials remain with the authors.