Just a very quick brain dump but hopefully something of use to anyone wanting to know more about productive meetings...
As I mentioned in a recent blog post, Adaptavist hate meetings because they waste time. Our last company meeting was back in February 2007 (and the meeting before that in November 2006) so we've left it an extremely long time (8 months) for the meeting we had today.
The meeting agenda has been in our wiki intranet for almost 3 weeks and some topics were practically covered before the meeting because of the IM discussions that resulted from the agenda - they were quickly skipped over thus making time for more detailed discussions on other items in the agenda.
Having waited such a long time since the last meeting, the topics on the agenda were all of vital importance - there were no pointless or trivial topics.
Everyone in the meeting had at least one topic where they were directly involved - a real reason to be there and a great opportunity to make sure the rest of the company knows exactly what they've been up to and what their plans are.
Some topics, however, were only relevant to a few of the attendees - for example, Huw and Caz didn't need to pay too much attention to the topic of documentation of Theme Builder and Community Bubbles.
What surprised me is that when a topic wasn't directly relevant to some attendees, rather than sit there and get bored they were able to get on with other work right there in the meeting - completed tasks included:
- Setting up a clone of adaptavist.com so we can do profiling and testing
- Fixing a really annoying bug in one of our Resin 3.1 containers (which led to Dan doing a victory dance which was possibly the most surreal thing I've seen at a company meeting)
- Answering several support tickets and sales enquiries
Although I was obviously deeply interested in every topic (as CEO I both need and want to be) I was still able to work with Alain to solve and reply to a support ticket from one of our Confluence Support (service level agreement) customers and make an urgent update to the Bach Academie de Montreal website (our first ever customer still with us) because their prestigious Gala Event tickets had sold out far faster than they expected so they needed the "Buy Now" buttons quickly removing.
We obviously spent a lot of time discussing our ongoing internal logistical problems relating to our sales process. It was great to see every single attendee contributing to our battle plan to solve this long standing issue and we've come up with a plan:
- Stop trying to do everything at once - solve one problem at a time
- Start with the licensing module that's holding up release of Builder and Bubbles
- Sort out the internal accounts database to remove bottlenecks with payment reconciliation and accounting
- Roll out ACP2 in stages:
- Payment tracking (already done, just not fully tested)
- Customers able to create orders and raise proformas/invoices online as well as make payments
- etc.
Throughout the meeting Dan Hardiker edited the agenda in the wiki so that we had a full transcript of everything that happened. There were even a couple of extra topics added at the end of the meeting which were also edited in to the agenda.
The fact that everyone was so involved and even that we'd immediately start work on outstanding tasks to remain productive during topics that weren't directly relevant to us is what impressed me the most. It's exactly the type of culture we wanted to achieve at Adaptavist and today's meeting has really proved that we've achieved it!
