Discussions, Meetings, Emails & One-on-one

I have been thinking lately, how much average person in IT industry spent time in meetings /discussions in his/her entire career. Below tweet from friend leads to the inception of this post

Best and worst part about software development is discussion.#softwareDev

— Ajinkya (@i_ajinkya) October 23, 2015

I decided to break down the post in few questions which would help me to conclude by end of the  post

1. Why we need meetings/discussions?
2. What are we doing wrong about the meetings/discussions?
3. What are possible alternatives to  meetings/discussions? - Emails & One-on-one
4. What agile has to say about meetings/ discussions?
5. How can you make meetings/ discussions fruitful?

Let's discuss this question one by one-

1. Why we need meetings/discussions?
       Below are the reasons I can think of why discussions/meetings are called for, in general:-

• To bring every team member on the same page about a current status of Project.
• To discuss and define the roadmap.
• To have everyone's opinion & discuss possible options on particular problem
• Discuss loopholes in the current processes.

And this list can go on and on ...but in general, these reasons are enough to have an idea what I'm talking about.

2. What are we doing wrong about the meetings/discussions?
        Do you found yourself in a situation where you wonder 'what you are doing in the meeting?'
        Do you hear voices in your head screaming 'what's wrong with these people, why are we wasting so much time?'

Take a deep breath, you are not alone. Here is the list of things that makes a meeting a wrong meeting.

• Meeting/Discussion without an agenda - If you don't define the purpose of your meet, it's most certainly be unfruitful.
• 11th-hour invite for a meeting - People leaving their desks with something in a mind and have no clear idea about the purpose of a meeting, It's going to be a disaster for them.
• Accepting invitation without thinking - 'Do I really need to attend this meeting?
• Sending a meeting request to everyone in a team instead of required stakeholders. - If you schedule a meeting for an hour for a team of eight members (1 * 8 =8hrs ), do you think it would be that productive as work of the single person in a whole day?
                      And that person can be anybody - a fresher who recently on boarded your team or principal architect of the project.

3.What are the possible alternatives to meetings/discussions? -     Emails & One-on-one

I was wondering isn't it entirely possible to remove discussions & meeting from software professional's calendar. So before actually writing this post, I started Q & A on WhatsApp with few intelligent minds. And below are few awesome replies. 

- "Email cannot always convey emotions or urgency,  even if a message is conveyed."

- "Language itself is ambiguous, body language & emotions helps while conveying matter."

-  "It is possible to convey priority over an email but its most likely impossible to convey severity."

- "Mail, Skype can help in communication but in person, face to face meetings / discussion helps to create bonding essential for a team."

All above point seems to be valid to me and yes at some point we must need to have meetings/discussions. We should set some rules/protocol/standards when to have a meetings/discussions, email & one-on-one.

4.What agile has to say about meetings/ discussions?

    Manifesto for Agile Software Development states that importance must be given to Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

source :- LeadingAgile

Though Scrum, which is an agile software development model, have regular meetings like Stand-up meeting, Sprint review meeting & Retrospective meeting, according to manifesto one-on-one & discussion meeting should get preference over email.


5. How can you make meetings/discussions fruitful?
    I would be doing a separate post on this ...




PS: - These are funny replies that I have received while doing WhatsApp Q&A, Hope you will enjoy it.