How Often You Should Run Team Meetings

I guess many managers have their own answer to the question how often they should have their team gathered in the room on a cyclic meeting. I guess answers varies from “Never, I hate those people.” to “Twice a day, they’ll get lost without my guidance.” Agilists will shout: “Every day, but 15-minuters only. And burn all the chairs in the meeting room.” Old-fashioned managers will go rather for multi-hours sitting meetings where they can play all those ego-boosting office wars.

OK, that’s the bunch of options, but yes, I have my own. To be honest I put the question only to give my favorite answer to any question (“Do you want a beer?” question not included). The answer is:

It depends.

By the way, one of thing why I’m not a big fan of agile methods is because they’re highly formalized… Yes, they are… Yes, they are… Yes, they… never mind. I don’t agree you have to meet everyday no matter what project you run. I don’t agree fortnight is the best cycle length in software development. It depends. It depends on the team, the project, the customer, resources and goals. Those things, including meeting frequency, can’t be standardized.

Coming back to the question how often you should run team meetings… There are few factors you have to consider when you gather the team, or part of it, on the meeting.

• How fast information is overdue. When you have two-week development cycle (no, I haven’t said it’s all wrong) meeting every day or every two days to summarize progress is a good idea. Having a meeting once during the cycle is definitely not so clever.

• How often you waste time of the team. You force developers to leave their beloved PCs while in the flow of inventing new ground-breaking, cutting-edge, world-changing algorithms. You sit with those who came on time waiting for those who are always 5-minutes late. Yes, every meeting, even with the most creative outcome, is at least a bit of a waste of time.

• What outcome is expected. And when you want to have it on your desk. You don’t try to rearrange development tasks assignments during the last week of planned development phase. You do it during the second week, because after the first one you have first lags. OK, I know, with two-week cycle the second one actually is the last one. If you need some work to be done after the meeting you need to allocate the time for that. Even the most skilled architect won’t create technical design document of the high-availability real-time system within a day.

• When all parties are free. That’s the easiest one. At least for the most of managers I know. You don’t run meetings just for sake of running meetings but to execute some actions on some people: giving information, receiving information, assigning a task, asking a question, giving feedback etc. You want it or not, as far as you don’t have another interested party on the other side of the table it isn’t very successful. So take a minute to check their availability before sending invitations.

A couple of factors drive you to have the meetings faster/more often, another couple quite the opposite. There’s really no rule of thumb here. With tight three-week development schedule, we meet twice a week with developers. When talking about meetings summarizing status of all projects we run them once a week, but we keep their frequency religiously. With general team meetings, where we share information about things everyone works on, we try to follow once-a-week schedule, but without any pain we cancel events whenever it’s hard to make it. Individual face to face meetings with people from my team I have every time they (or I) feel like having one.