Keith Harmeyer
SmartStorming LLC

Thank you for sharing your valuable experience, I have gone through your article, like you mentioned, the approach works only with a small team, and I’d say with small team & fully dedicated to the project, means the environment is a projectized one, however as you know this is not the case with most of projects, most of times some resources are dedicating 50% of their times to the project and the other 50% are assigned to operational work, so getting everyone in the same location may not work out…

The key is Co-Location, I used to work in some environments where we were not meeting in the meeting room unless there is a big problem that requires attention of everyone.. and communication was really easy and smooth, but with virtual teams revolution, co-location is not as robust as before even with using technologies such as video conferencing and virtual meeting rooms..

Of course that much depends on organization you work in – the bigger it is and the more spread it is over the world the harder it would be to avoid meetings. Same with cooperating with other teams and subcontractors – with more external dependencies it’s harder to avoid meetings.

However when it comes to your own project team there is much in your hands. Personally I was surprised that we were able to rule almost all meetings out in our team. It takes specific environment but to some level I believe everyone could try this.

Yes most of times the meeting itself is the only objective, people should think twice before calling for a meeting and try to find out whether the meeting is really required or not, the meeting calculator idea should be an enterprise wide culture not to be adopted by a team member member or even the entire team, the meetings area need more discipline and attention, a lot of companies lose too much money due to ineffective meetings, if they start the meeting calculator approach and meetings time will be logged, people will pay more attention to this precious costly times, and if they know that they can be asked any time about why they spend too much time in meetings they will start to be cautious about it!

Thanks for this interesting article which can help us to focus more on the goals of our meetings (the meeting itself is too often the only goal!).

The Meeting Calculator is a good idea but it may be useless if you are not able to calculate the ROI of a meeting (as you say you need “to assess benefit versus cost”).

Having only 5 minutes before my next meeting, I will not give any idea about this assessment yet but I promise to think about it!

Thank you again
Guy