How to run developer team meetings

communicationmanagementmeetingsteamteam-building

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).

Best Answer

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.

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