Manage It!

Troubleshooting Meetings

Here are some problems your meetings might encounter and how to troubleshoot them:

Your daily standup takes more than fifteen minutes. Make sure people are standing up. Once people sit down, the meeting takes longer.

Make sure people report on finished work. If people report on work in progress, they’re not decomposing the requirements into small enough features, or they’re not breaking their tasks down into inch-pebbles.

No one arrives on time for your meetings. If this is just a problem for your project, renegotiate the time of the meeting. Maybe you’ve interrupted people’s flow by having the meeting at this time. I once held all project team meetings over lunch (because the team requested a lunch meeting). I called ...