Originally posted by: BoberFett
Originally posted by: Descartes
Weekly team meetings (at least) are essential. Silly games are not.
We have daily team meetings, but we're not trying to bond like children. We have a standing meeting for everyone to communicate what they're working on, what hurdles they have and what they're working on tomorrow (similar to SCRUM).
Some places those work, others they don't. I do weekly meetings and just depend on email to communicate with my department the rest of the week.
No doubt. It doesn't work for everyone for sure. If we have a high caliber team, we can give them more individual responsibility. We have some engagements where the entire team will be off in the weeds in less than two days if we don't keep them on target. It's almost fun to see where their mind took them, like an intellectual telephone game if you get my meaning.
Our marketing department tried the stand up meeting approach and at the peak they had two 45 minute stand up meetings per day with 10 to 15 people hanging around bored. They didn't quite understand the concept of a quick status meeting.
That's always the problem it seems. I actually timebox responses and tell people they have 10 minutes to make a decision. Nothing is worse than sitting there spinning your wheels going over every single possible solution to a problem; identify the problem, identify the possible solutions and pick a direction. Failing that, take it out of the meeting and come back with a direction after more research.
Getting people involved in the meeting is part of the difficulty as well. I find that singling people out often helps. Most people want the opportunity to talk, but not if it's a free-for-all and a few people keep standing on the soap box. I go around the group and say, "BobberFett, yes/no?"
imo
It probably has to do with the fact that we're IT - logical, and result driven - while marketing is invariably made up of people who couldn't get real jobs.
lol. I gave up on trying to get concrete responses from marketing folks. I have met my fair share of IT people that love analysis-paralysis though. Every response is met with "Well...."
:thumbsup:
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