Are weekly status meetings necessary?

Question

What is your experience with weekly status meetings for a development team? How can they be made useful?

Answer 1

They're useful only if you make them useful.

Get objective statuses from people, not just "Oh, I'm doing fine." If you do, you'll end up with the Brillant Paula Bean. Have weekly deliverables and track against those. These are really important to getting the project done on time. If it's not, tasks become nebulous and eat up too much time very easily.

Answer 2

Kind of depends entirely on how they're run and how long they take, but I think this is also one of those things where you get out what you put in.

In general I'd say that having a meeting at all is essential, but most tend to get bogged down in practice. You really want a smart, fast PM to run them.

Answer 3

Some believe that no new information should be conveyed in meetings.

Meetings should be for revealing strategic information and resolving specific issues.

At my primary job, we have 1/2 hour biweekly status meeting, just so we remember who's on the team (we're about 1/2 telecommuters). And if there is nothing new, it gets canceled.

On another project that I work with part-time for a volunteer effort, we hold daily scrum meetings to determine who is available that day and if there are any impediments. That meeting is capped at 5 minutes.

Answer 4

Communication is one of the greatest causes of software failure. If you can keep everyone well informed without them, that's ok.

In scrum, there are daily meetings for this, and they last (at least should) only 15 minutes.

Answer 5

Check out Scrum, in which the development team has daily standing 15-minute meetings. (In fact, they're supposed to be 15 minutes maximum, and you're supposed to hold them standing up in order to keep things from dragging on.) The rough idea is for everyone answer three questions:

• What did I do yesterday?
• What am I planning on doing today?
• What's blocking me from moving forward?

Those three questions manage to keep people focused, make it obvious when someone isn't moving forward, and encourages everyone to communicate about why, and what could be done to get back on track. We use Scrum where I work, and it's been absolutely great.

Answer 6

Hi

I would say they are useful to some extent. They help keep track of where a project is heading, especially if the team is big. They should be to the point and not drag unnecessarily.

cheers

Answer 7

Are you referring to project status meetings or administrative team status meetings? These are very different things where the latter can be useful for having information flow down to the minions like how the company is doing, what big things are coming up that some may want to prepare in case something happens like lots of overtime or a hard deadline that a group may have.

Answer 8

We have weekly meetings mainly for outstanding support issues. We also use weeklies to discuss upcoming projects, who would be involved in them and which scrum team they're going to be assigned to.

Answer 9

It really depends. If this is just a series of one on ones with everybody in the room for the boss to save some time - forget it.

But done correctly, they are of great value

• include for example some team code review
• if you have short development cycles, use it to scrub the feature list for next week
• keep it short

Some of the chapter in "Peopleware" and Adrenaline Junkie"are quite helpful. As are some post by Rands in Repose, such as this one.

Answer 10

We do weekly meetings where I work. Our team is 18-head strong and everyone attends but only sub-team managers are allowed to present the work they are responsible for.

This status meeting is used to inform everyone on the team what everyone else has been working on the past week: first the highlights/lowlights are presented, then the risk/issues followed by requests for decision and then plans for the coming week. Weeklies last for 45-60 minutes and there is generally a short 1/2 hour presentation on a technical subject afterwards.

We have a watchdog volunteer who keeps track of the time spent by each sub-team manager. The weekly stays on time because the watchdog reminds the offender when their speaking time is getting too long.

Without weeklies, I guess the whole team would still be functional but it creates a stronger connection between developers when every one knows what everyone else is working on. It also sometimes allows for very fast issue solving when people recognize situations they have been in themselves and can help fixing it.

Answer 11

You should never ever have a status meeting.

Weekly meetings are fine.

Answer 12

We have our weekly meeting in the pub.

Answer 13

From my experience, meetings can be very valuable, but only if you have the right corporate culture for it. I used to work for a company where meetings were loathed, and because of that they were never productive. In the company where I work now, I find that much is accomplished in the meetings I attend, though I've heard from others that other meetings are less useful. I think it boils down to leadership and involvement. The right person can get everyone involved and make it productive.

Sometimes the meeting environment can have an impact. Your meeting room should be a somewhat enjoyable place to go. It can also be nice to get out of the office once in a while, if possible. Some teams can also benefit from purely fun activities; it could be a Friday afternoon, or perhaps outside of normal work hours. My team has four people, so I'm trying to organize a golf game.

As for the weekly part, it depends what you're doing and how fast you're doing it. My team normally meets only once a month, but we interact with each other on a daily basis in between time. Each person on the team has a different responsibility, so it's often sufficient for only two or three people to get together. So far we've only had one month where we decided to call an extra meeting in the middle of the month because of a major problem. If responsibilities are less defined, you might need to meet more often.

To make a long story short, if you think you need to meet more often, meet more often. If you think you need to meet less often, meet less often. Don't just have weekly meetings because somebody said it's the best or you read it in a book. If you're meeting every two weeks and want to meet more often, then it might make sense to meet weekly. If you're meeting once a month or less often, I wouldn't jump straight to weekly meetings.

Answer 14

I agree with the suggestion of daily stand-up status meetings - they work on my team (I'm a lead developer, of a team of only three though). Good way to keep up with the "pulse" of the team and find out what problems might be occurring, without degenerating into hours of talking shop. Looking around my building many of the teams choose to hold morning meetings, but our stand-up is in the afternoon, and I almost never initiate it myself; I wait until someone's so desperate to go home they start the meeting anyway. That ensures that it's brief :-).

It's good to get people to talk about goals not tasks too; so the following is bad:

Today I worked on the spline reticulator, and tomorrow I'll be looking at the chaos logic.

But the following is good:

Today I fixed three bugs in the spline reticulator, and tomorrow I'll add the clone operation to the chaos engine.

That way the devs all explicitly give themselves something to work toward and measure their progress against.

Answer 15

No, they're not necessary, but they can be useful.

Weekly meeting is ideally the only meeting involving more than 2-3 people that developer attends during a week.

I do weekly meetings which usually last about 30-60 minutes and cover:

• updates to the team on "the big picture" and any new events, not necessarily programming-related
• quick status reports by all team members, so that everybody knows what others are working on; I might chime in if I think they forgot to mention something that might be of interest to the rest of the team
• gossips and anything that comes to mind; this is a time and place to discuss politics or plan go see a movie

This weekly meeting is not necessarily each week, and not necessarily at the same time; I schedule them when there is something to discuss, and when most of the team members are available (some of them don't work full-time, and some of them come to office only once a week).

Weekly meetings are not where most of the team communication should occur; a lot of times, couple of developers will work on same part of system or project together, and I try to get out of the way. Every team member should know who has the most experience on specific technology or part of system if they need help or get stuck.

Also, weekly meeting is only rarely a place where I will get status updates from team members. I usually spend more time with junior developers (sometimes as often as several times a day), and I might not talk to senior developer for week or two. I typically talk to every team member at least once every day or two; either I ask for quick status report, or the person IM's me that he's done and needs more work. Many times this "status updates" won't be status updates at all - I will know the status from architectural/requirements questions developer asks me.

Although I prefer that developers talk to each other directly, I try to be some sort of communications hub in the team, meaning that I prefer they ask me what they don't know. I either answer them or give them the contact who has the answer. This means that I'll get interrupted a lot, but it creates less interruptions to others, and is also a sneaky way to receive status updates without actually spending precious time to have meetings on status updates. For young teams, that means a lot of involvement on my part, but as a team matures they should ideally become almost completely self-reliant.