How to run developer team meetings?

Question

Our team of 10 developers meet weekly. The meetings are rather boring and not particularly useful. What format/agenda do you utilize to have good meetings?

We meet weekly in the conference room with pizza provided. The format is we go around the room and list the status of various tasks we are working on and discuss tasks for the next week. Managers will provide an overview of upcoming projects and priorities for the coming months and year ahead.

Update

The goal of these meeting is more or less - general team building, to share the knowledge of what everyone is working on, and to keep everyone aware of shifting company initiatives. It is not to formally 'hand out' work assignments (that is done via other means).

Answer 1

We usually have 1-hour meeting every Monday morning (10 man team), around 9am:

• Top Down: 15 minutes for the TL (Team Lead), who tells us what's going in the company (new contracts, new developments, anything exciting...)
• Round the Table: 15 minutes for a round-the-table (less than 2 minutes each then) where we just say what we're doing to make sure everyone knows what's going on, and during which the TL will tell us the general direction for the week to come. Specifics are kept at bay.
• Presentation: 30 minutes for a presentation of one of the project we've got. Either high-level overview, mockup or technical, it depends on who's doing the presentation and what they are working on. The presentation is open and people invited to chim in. If a discussion gets too specific though, it's postponed, so that the presentation can go on.

I really like those meetings, personally, because it's a fast way to get up-to-date on what's going on outside of my little pet projects.

The important point, I think, is to keep the specifics out:

• at the end of the week (end of Thursday/early Friday) we do a full report on what we did, what was scheduled and was postponed/cancelled and the issues we encountered to the TL, no need to repeat that on Monday morning and bore every one out of their wits
• extended discussions are discouraged, and people encouraged to schedule a specific meeting with those concerned.

It works rather well (especially, I guess, because our TL meet with his colleages and boss on Friday so we get fresh news).

People may bring croissants, or other stuff, but it's not mandatory and not scheduled. We do appreciate when anyone does though!

Answer 2

By the time we do our team meetings, we already know what we've been doing all week and what we'll be doing next week. And we have a reasonable overview of the long-term plan.

What we do in our team meetings is talk about what is bugging us. Anything that happened in the last week which slowed us down significantly, things that we'd like to change in the future, particularly process problems.

The round-table format is similar to yours but we come out of it with a load of tasks for various people. And we're very keen to keep it light-hearted. People are expected to be able to be totally open and are discouraged from taking things personally.

And we deliberately time this meeting to be the last half of a Friday morning and go from there to the pub for lunch (non-mandatory), which doesn't necessarily last only an hour.

I would suggest from experience that managers (ie. anyone above team leader / project manager) shouldn't be in these meetings. It only discourages people from being totally honest. Team leaders / project managers can relay messages upwards in different meetings.

Answer 3

Cancel the damned meetings. They have no point unless they have a point. I have been at too many of these over the last 15 years. I'm pretty sure that if the brain cells injured by these no-agenda "team meetings" were still functioning, my team and I would have built something that sold for billions of dollars and I could retire to relative obscurity and pursue my dream of fiddling with some code that only I care about for the next twenty years.

You probably have brief daily status meetings or stand-ups already. If you must continue the ritual of wasting a hour a week so that you feel like you're team building, then team build already. Set an agenda or request items from your team members that they think the team should address, and give them the power to go and act on those impulses after the meeting. That's it.

If there's nothing worthy of note on the agenda the day before the meeting, cancel it and go out to drinks (or coffee) for an early after work diversion, so that you don't interrupt whatever concentration might have actually been built up just before the scheduled interruption, and just talk about whatever comes to mind. Geek talk. It'll just happen. It's ok. If you're paying me well enough, I won't even mind buying my own gin and tonic.

I've had enough crappy lukewarm pizza at boring team meetings over the last 15 years of my career to add at least 10 of the excess pounds on my waistline, and I actually walk to and from work most days. I don't need it. Unless the people in my team suck, in which case I'm already plotting my exit, I'll build my own rapport, no structured exercises required. I'll get more done, I'll be happier, and my coworkers will like me more than if I feel obligated to present some attempt at proving my intellectual horsepower or listen to people drone on about process improvements or ritualized intellectual masturbation about source control provider factory seed data unit test models for widget acceleration and best practices for leveraging my strategic initiatives for performance test environments. (Sorry, I was snoozing and I just picked a random string of terms to regurgitate that I half-heard over the last twenty minutes of pointlessness.)

Answer 4

If things get boring, discuss the latest tech. Ask developers what they've been doing with new frameworks, servers, etc.

Answer 5

You could try reporting last weeks progress in an e-mail ahead of time and only discuss issues that caused problems and briefly outline what you're going to do this week. This will keep each person's report brief and interesting.

The upcoming projects and priorities shouldn't usually change from week to week so why not move these into a separate monthly meeting. If anything urgent comes up then it can be raised in the weekly meeting, otherwise you're just going to be repeating yourselves.

I'd also lose the pizza. You don't want any distractions.

Answer 6

When our team was all local, we used to have these weekly meetings. If your goal is for growing the team (rather than the team reporting status specifically to you), then my advice would be to take as much "process" or structure out. We started off just like you, go around the table and everyone list their work, while everyone listening was bored out of their skulls if that work didn't apply to them in any way.

One thing that we decide as the team, is that if our boss was going to make us sit in a room for an hour, we will at least have donuts. so we went around the room and every week different person would be in charge of donuts (one process everyone can subscribe to). Our boss also relaxed over time and instead of specific topics to list and move on, we just went around the table and only brought up stuff that bugged us or that was cool/interesting. If your mouth was stuffed with a donut or you didn't feel like speaking that morning, you could just pass.

As a developer in a big company, I could make a list of 250 things that company does to waste my time, but I actually found those meetings fun way to just shoot the sh#t with the team and eat donuts. Now that our team is located in 3 different states and 4 countries, we don't have those meetings any more :(

Answer 7

I find these are better if the devs get to showcase what they've accomplished. Devs are disinterested in the generic awe of the masses (sorry, masses) but the respect and esteem of our peers (who actually understand how difficult that must have been, or how clever, etc) is an addiction. Devs love the new shiny better stronger faster cleaner whatever. Group setting -> your monday morning LAN party. ^^ The meeting must focus on the devs and the code / tech or it's generally a waste of the dev's time (devs will bond over the code ^^ it just happens.)

HTH