Nice day outside, but I gotta get better at this meeting thing...

It was a very fine day out there, beyond the computer room and the car window.  Positively warm at times!  Got one son outside running around for a bit anyway - lots of the kids on the street congregating and running around.  A good thing.

Work was weird today - two of our six team members left for another team.  Personnel changes always make things different, although it isn't a problem, just different.  It will be weirder when the four of us move in with the three others to form a larger team.  What I really learned today at work was that I have to plan out meetings much better than I have been.

I organized a meeting earlier in the week because we have three different teams collaborating on a set of features.  We have had meetings on and off over the last couple of months, just to get things off the ground.  We still have 2 deliverables between now and the project this collaboration is for.  One of the participating teams has been able to spare a person to work ahead, which is a great way to take advantage of these weird times between projects.  I wanted to have a meeting to go over our coding standards and talk about some patterns I'd seen in code reviews.  I booked an hour and said the meeting was about coding standards, but I knew that we probably wouldn't fill the time with just coding standard talk.  We spent the first half talking about coding standards and then the rest talking about the work being done and what we should keep a look out for.  I left pleased that we were able to discuss all the concerns I had going in, plus we were able to talk about planning future work as well.  What I found out today was that some, but not all, the other attendees disagreed.  One person in particular left feeling like something unspecified was imposed and that work that was entirely premature was being demanded.  

This happened because of a break down in meeting structure.  A good meeting would start with an agenda established ahead of time, a facilitator keeping everyone to the agenda and time reserved at the end to make sure everyone is agreeing to the same things.  Specifically, the meeting had a single item on the agenda and it was vague.  Deep and unrelated topics were raised during the meeting.  No summary was proposed at the end.  To resolve this issue, I talked individually with a few participants to find out what they took away and to tell them what I took away.  This worked well - we all wanted the same things, so it was easy to get agreement with a little clarification.  I also learned some important information that completed changed my opinions about planning for the project - pieces of information that were known before the meeting by half the attendees.

Next time, I will create a more specific agenda, save time at the end to tell everyone what happened, and make sure to ask everyone about any project news at the beginning.  That should save at least a half-hour for each person and keep things moving smoothly.