Tag: project management

  • Team Meeting Strategy

    The team meeting.

    It’s one of those necessary evils of most organizations.

    No one truly enjoys them but it’s also critical for teammates to get an idea of where you are at regularly. Whether you are a start-up with 3 employees or a conglomerate with thousands of employees across multiple offices and departments, this is one of those ubiquitous things you do.

    For as long as I’ve had these meetings I’ve heard people complain about them. But the simple truth is I don’t know of a better alternative. How else are you going to know who is doing what, what needs to  get done, and how we are doing as a team?

    Forms of team meetings

    I break it down into two distinct styles:

    1. The sit down – Get the coffee, even the shortest version of this is an hour.
    2. The stand up – Get the coffee, but we aren’t going to sit so it’ll only last 10-15 minutes.

    Style of team meetings

    I break it down into three types:

    1. Report to the boss – Everything is presented to or directed at the boss, who responds and digs deeper as needed.
    2. Catch up with the team – Everything is directed at the team, those who need to ask more questions do so.
    3. Hybrid – Most team meetings are this, there’s a little bit of reporting to the boss, and hopes of collaboration.

    Adam’s rules for team meetings

    1. Be prepared – Typically these happen weekly. If you don’t show up ready you don’t take your job seriously.
    2. It’s a briefing, keep it brief – When I show up I want to have my facts handy, I try to stay on point, and I want to plainly communicate the whole truth. Facts, numbers, problems.
    3. Don’t hide failures – I like to make sure I communicate where I’m struggling, where my problems are, etc. Hiding that only leads to bad things.
    4. Open to questions – Even when I screw up, I make sure to ask if anyone has any follow-up questions.
    5. If you aren’t the team lead, don’t take over – I don’t like it when someone dominates this meeting that isn’t in charge of the meeting.
    6. If you are the team lead, moderate well – When I’m running these meetings I make sure I keep them moving. I’m never afraid to interrupt and say, “That’s a sidebar, let’s meet later.” Or “it would be better if you two just talked about that and reported back next time.“
    7. The meter is running – In my mind, I calculate the hourly rate of these types of meetings. If there are 10 people who average $30/hour, are we getting $300/hour worth of benefit here?

    What about you? What are your rules for team meetings?

  • Schlepping through a data schmutz

    At work I’m doing a data smash. That is a tech geek way [I made up the term myself] of saying I’m taking all of our pipelines of customer web data and pouring it into one bucket to see if there’s anything interesting I can learn.

    It’s an experiment. There’s no guarantee it’ll tell me anything!

    Lately I’ve felt like I should put my lab coat on when I go into the office. And I find myself telling data jokes that people just stare at.

    It’s a very interesting experiment from 30,000 feet. But in the course of doing it, at ground level, it’s pretty flipping boring. As I trudge through spreadsheets, cleaning data, and merging terms like “church” and “organization” and “account” from various databases into one consistent term– I try not to let my mind wander. Consequently, at the end of the day I’m completely mentally exhausted. And you thought my job was just playing on YouTube, Facebook, and podcasts?

    My little experiment makes me think of real scientists in  real lab coats doing real experiments. These folks test a hypothesis with their hard work, ingenuity, intuition, experience… and money. Like my little experiment at work they don’t know if their hard work will ever pay off or if they’ll have to admit that their hypothesis failed despite all of the hard work, ingenuity, intuition, education, and money.

    And yet some of them work years and years, day-after-day, on the mundane unsexy experiments that change the world in big sexy ways. They invent new medical devices, develop vaccines, make sure the stuff we use is safe, on and on. Our society is dependent on nerds in lab coats.

    They are often the quiet heroes of our civalization. And yet we never learn their names.

    Better find my pretend lab coat and get back to work.