Managing Software for Growth: Without Fear, Control, and the Manufacturing Mindset

Meetings

The word “meeting” usually doesn't mean “a gathering where we talk about stuff.” It usually means a required gathering, called by someone other than me, for his purposes instead of mine, that will keep me from doing the work I currently have to do, and will probably give me more work when it's over. This is not what meetings should be.

Once a project for a large telecommunications client, things were down to the wire for my team. We were responsible for the piece of a large customer billing system. Our subsystem formatted the bills customers would see, which meant the critical path went right through us. Things weren't going so well, and the client manager was getting very nervous. As you might imagine, he decided to try to get things ...