Working meetings are useful too
Instead of a planning meeting, you might need a working meeting. Plan to meet and do the work together, then and there. This saves you going in circles, and speeds up the delivery of your work. It can also be more fun too. You share the pain and the joy.
Scatter Gather is slower than Working Together
Alice, Bob and Sue meet to plan their collaborative work. They map out who will do what, by which deadline and then go their separate ways. They reconvene in a week. In between these meetings they post progress and questions to their team channel. When they meet again they discover they have to do more work to fix misunderstanding of the concepts and ideas.
Avril, Bill and Sarah also meet to plan their collaborative work. They organise planning meetings and also working meetings to do the work together. When they meet again for another planning meeting in a week time everything is fine. The work is done, and they move on to the next steps in their collaboration. By doing the work together they quickly resolve misunderstandings in their shared vision.
Doing the work together speeds everything up. Team members learn from each other. They clarify misunderstandings, and also find out what doesn’t work, and organise alternative solutions. This avoids the delay that happens with individual solo work that reports back to team planning meetings.
I’ve experienced this lots of times myself, and also seen student teams work well this way.
It also works in industry. Go read the stories yourself in this post, and in the linked stories in the comments. I’ve heard similar stories from others too.
Teach others the joy of working meetings
Try this approach yourself too in your team. Pair and mob on work and see how you speed up learning and feedback. Have more ‘doing meetings‘. Take the results of 3 hours instead of the 10-12 weeks mentioned by Mike Bowler in his report. This is the result of everyone being on the same page at the same time and doing the work together.
Tell others in your team and organisation about this approach too to spread the joy.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
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The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.