A protocol for meetings

A meeting must have objectives. All relevant information should be circulated in advance to all participants of the meeting.

In every meeting there should be a minute taker, minutes should be circulated after the meeting. The meeting is not over

until all attendees have expressed their opinions, and all the objectives have been reached. Otherwise, pending points should be rescheduled for another meeting.

A meeting should not be called to read an email to all attendees. Email should be sent in advance, then eventually ask people what they think.

These emails should be concise, and with precise topics. Complex stuff should not be treated in emails, they have invented voice conversations for that.

It’s the management responsibility to identify tasks – which should be as much as possible atomic –prioritize them, and assign them to the technical resources.

Technical people can help in this process, but “task management” is strictly the management responsibility.

It’s the duty of the technical resource to provide regular (once a day, your mileage might vary) progress report to management.

Management has always the right to review priorities and reassign tasks, but bearing in mind that in general this should be avoided.

Excessive task switching is a known factor of burnout and poor work quality.

All management stuff should be discussed in management meeting ,to which technical resources do not need to attend.

Meetings are meant for people to exchange information and reach agreement,

they should not be the monopoly of a single people who takes all the bandwidth and prevents communication amongst other attendees.

As a rule of thumb, in a meeting with 10 people, no more than 30% of the time should be allocated to a single attendee.

If a single person talks for more than 3 minutes in a row in a meeting, this is a communication antipattern.

Long lasting verbal communication should be avoided, and if really needed backed up by schemas, writing etc. Not all people have the same receptivity

to verbal communication, and visual communication is to be preferred over pure verbal conceptualization.