Unproductive Meetings and Waste

How much time do you spend adding customer value? What do you do the rest of your time?

If you are like most product development folks, you spend a lot of your time in meetings. Yet it amazes me how often I walk into a company that claims to understand lean which is still using "batch process" meeting management:

• Standing meetings at a specified time to cover a wide range of topics.


• Decisions that get revisited because the wrong people are in the room when the group makes a decision.


• Presentations that take hours to prepare, only to get short-circuited when the team runs out of time (or the wrong people are there).


• People who are there merely to receive status updates because otherwise, there is no way for them to get the information they need in their jobs. You can recognize these people in a technology company by the ratio of time spent talking to time spent answering email or surreptitiously surfing the Internet.


• Meeting schedules that are so full that there's no time for informal "hallway conversation" or meeting preparation.

Meetings are one of those things that respond well to traditional lean thinking, especially the concept of one piece flow. Why do we batch up our issues and decisions for once-weekly team meetings or once-quarterly project reviews? Why not simply take care of them as they arise?

I coach the teams I work with to use "one piece meeting flow" - one topic per meeting - for everything except status updates. A "one piece meeting" includes everyone who has necessary input into the decision at hand - and no one extra. The organizer sends an A3 or similar brief report ahead of time with the expectation that the attendees will read it in advance. There is no opening presentation because everyone already knows why they are there, and what they need to contribute. There is no time for email because everyone is engaged in the discussion from the beginning of the meeting. At the end, the organizer updates the report with the meeting's outcome and forwards it to all the people who need to know.

For status updates, I like stand-up meetings that last no longer than ten minutes per day, or a half hour once per week. That is just enough time to get progress updates from the team, but not enough time to get bogged down into issues that should really be solved in a "one piece" meeting.