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RB | November 18, 2016

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Stop Having These Meetings

Followers of the Bach Seat know that passwords suck. As a Project Manager, something that also sucks are bad meetings. Meetings that don’t have an agenda or a goal or a purpose will suck the motivation out of people coming to the meeting. In the interest of having fewer sucky meetings here are some meetings, your team will thank you for eliminating or fixing.

The Monday morning staff meeting

Monday Morning Staff Meetings The problem with this meeting is that no one is ever ready for it. After all, it’s 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Nothing has happened yet and whatever happened last week is mostly ancient history. A second problem with this meeting is that for anyone to be ready, they have to work Sunday night. That is fine on occasion but guaranteed to earn you some serious votes for “jerk of the year” from employees and the family members of employees. For a while, I worked for an insomniac boss who would fire off emails off at 2:00 AM on Sunday. She would expect answers at 8:00 AM meetings. It was a happy day when she moved on.

The third problem with this meeting is that stuff happens on the weekends. And stuff needs to be addressed, especially in IT. Did you change your tapes? Check your logs? Walk your data center? Are there warning lights? How many tickets are there? Who has time for a meeting? The solution: if you must run a team meeting on Monday, push it to later in the morning or early in the afternoon. Better yet, push it to Tuesday morning.

The Round-the-Table status meeting

We have all been there. It’s the meeting where focus moves around the room and everybody shares their latest updates, sagas, fantasies, and dreams. Sit in the wrong place and you end up as the 19th person to offer an update. By that time nobody cares because their bladders are over-strained and brains numb from the politically oriented updates emanating from the mouths of colleagues in far-away functions.

The solution: meet if you must, but set some rules on the updates. Ask people to focus on important news that impacts everyone or on challenges that need help from across functions. Do anything to limit the painful march of gratuitous and self-serving status updates that undisciplined round-the-table meetings generate.

Recurring meetings with no purpose

Any recurring meeting where no one can remember why this meeting still takes place is a candidate for immediate elimination. The laws of physics transfer to meetings. A meeting on the schedule tends to stay on the schedule long after it has used up its usefulness in the workplace.

The solution: review all the recurring meetings that you subject your team to or that you are a participant in. Drop them from your life and the lives of your team members. If you are not the host of the meeting, tell the host of your intention and of your perspective on the utility of the meeting. If you are the host/sponsor, poll team members and give them a voice and a vote. A bit of draconian slicing of recurring meetings opens up valuable time for other more important activities.

Group wordsmithing

This is any meeting where you pull together a group of people to work on the wording for something. Be it a vision, a mission, a strategy statement, a scope statement in project management. The output of these sessions is typically a series of awkwardly constructed sentences reflecting compromises on the part of the HPPiO. Everyone nods their heads, yes but no one agrees with the final product. The wording moves beyond ridiculous to just awful in trying to make the pain go away.

The solution: never relegate rough wording of anything to a committee. Take a stab at the item in question yourself. Then bounce it off a few colleagues. When you approach something that is beginning to work for you, very carefully ask for comments from a group. Ask clarifying questions, take great notes and then disappear and redraft the statement(s). Repeat the process as necessary.

Death by PowerPoint

Death by PowerPoint is a phenomenon that can make any meeting suck. The poor use of presentation software causes Death by PowerPoint (DBPP) according to TargetTech. Key contributors to DBPP include confusing graphics, slides with too much text, and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides out loud.

Audiences that are emotionally disconnected from the presentation are the fault of the presenter. There is a good chance that the speaker has not spent enough time and effort thinking about which key points he wants the audience to take away. Or she has spent entirely too much time and effort setting up the presentation in PowerPoint.

DBPP can be avoided if the speaker uses the technology as a visual aid to enhance what is being said. Do not rely on the technology to serve as the focus of the presentation. Don McMillan demonstrates what not to do with PowerPoint in his video “Life after Death by PowerPoint.”

How to be better at meetings

Meetings are opportunities ripe for overuse and even abuse. Strive to be the manager that respects the power and importance of meetings. Use these forums to focus on key issues and solicit ideas. To keep your meetings constructive you need to start with respect.

Respect the time that everyone puts into the sessions. Start your meetings on time. If your meeting starts on time there are fewer chances to derail others’ productivity throughout the day. Starting on time also helps you to end on time. This is crucial because once the time slot for the meeting is over, employees will start to mentally check out whether you’ve made it through the agenda.

rb-

Bad meetings suck so much that the Project Management Institute (PMI) added a section to the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) on meetings. that right – In version 5 of the PMBOK Integration Knowledge Area, there are four processes that have “Meetings” as a Tool & Techniques.

4.3 Direct and Manage Project Work
4.4 Monitor and Control Project Work
4.5 Perform Integrated Change Control
4.6 Close Project or Phase

This Project Manager’s Workflow Hack Transformed How GE Builds Airplane Engines (fastcompany.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Project Management | Tags: 2016, Agile, Gantt chart, Management, Meetings, Microsoft, MSFT, PMBOK, PMI, PowerPoint, Project management, Status meeting

RB | August 7, 2014

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Tips to Blend Agile, Waterfall

There is a battle waging for the hearts and minds of project managers. The battle is between Agile advocates and Waterfall supporters according to Eric Morgan, in a recent FierceCIO article. The CEO of AtTask explains that Agile loyalists see the benefit of empowering people and teams in a bottom-up approach that produces a faster, more responsive way of working. Meanwhile, traditionalists prefer a top-down Waterfall approach that neatly outlines all the steps in the project and defines the scope, budget, and schedule upfront–minimizing risk and uncertainty.

So who is right? The article says neither. Rather the article says that organizations with successful development cycles seem to use a mixed approach, using both methodologies for different projects. They cite Amazon (AMZN), an Agile powerhouse, could not have built s core web services product without some top-down dictation of standards. According to the AtTask CEO, the real difficulty for organizations, therefore, lies not in choosing one methodology over the other, but in successfully mixing the two methodologies.

Whether your organization is already juggling multiple methodologies or is considering adding Agile into the project management mix, here are four tips from the AtTask CEO on how to hybridize without sacrificing the visibility and productivity you need:

1. Transition to agile slowly

The biggest issue organizations face in adopting or expanding Agile is the cultural transition. Change is never easy, and moving from a top-down culture of command and control to a bottom-up approach where workers self-organize and self-prioritize will certainly test your leadership team. the article stresses it’s a cultural transition that many people in an organization feel is disruptive and too much of a challenge to the established culture. To make the transition smoother and improve adoption, you should try to slow down your process transition. Understand that onboarding a system like Agile is a long-term commitment and because only certain teams will benefit from its methodology, make sure that your organization takes the time to strategically consider where it would be most effective.

Define up front what you are trying to accomplish with Agile so everyone can understand the benefits. In addition, developing a culture of respect and appreciation for both methodologies within the organization is important. Acknowledge what works well with Waterfall and when it is most appropriate to use. This extra effort will build trust; make people more open and resilient to trying new methods; increase buy-in from management and team members; and ensure that everyone is on the same page and trying to accomplish the same goals.

2. Provide professional agile training

With dozens of different aspects and processes, Agile is complex. The AtTask CEO warns that one of the biggest strategic mistakes organizations make is not getting professional training at the start. In particular, it is crucial that middle management participates in training. “Middle management really holds the keys to the success of Agile adoption. They create all the procedures and policies. If the middle is not on board, the transformation will be shunned,” says Dean Leffingwell, author of “Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements Practices for Teams, Programs, and the Enterprise.” When middle management is properly trained, not only do they understand the value of Agile for themselves, but they can be influential in mentoring the team and in demonstrating the value of Agile to the leadership.

3. Allow teams to communicate

In many organizations, Agile teams often become insulated from the rest of the organization. According to Mr. Morgan, they work in a kind of bubble, rarely interfacing with other teams or departments. However, communication and collaboration are two of the most critical elements of an effective mixed-methodology enterprise. Finding a way to enable visibility and communication across distributed teams, such as developing standard processes for organizing requirements and cross-team development, ensuring comprehensive release visibility for both upstream and downstream stakeholders, and managing the entire work life-cycle within one tool, will make hybrid organizations much more productive.

4. Speak a language everyone understands

The nuanced terminology associated with Agile is often an area ripe for miscommunication according to the author. In addition to making sure everyone understands the terminology and is speaking the same language, it’s important to identify key data points, such as what the team is working on, where the team is along their work process, and when the team will complete the task. Then, translate the data points into either methodology. No matter what methodology your teams choose, the work being done ultimately must be visible to the organization’s management and executive teams. Because manager reports and dashboards tend to focus on Waterfall-centric metrics, Agile teams need to ensure they are able to translate their results and progress accordingly. Moving to a mixed management style will always present challenges.

The article concludes that adoption may happen in baby steps, and not leaps and bounds. Following these four tips, however, can make implementation much more successful and enable you to structure projects in a more productive way to meet your business goals.