How to Hold Productive IT Team Meetings

The announcement of an upcoming IT team meeting shouldn't elicit sighs and groans. The event, whether held in-person or online, should be viewed by both leaders and participants as an opportunity to address goals and identify pathways to enhanced productivity and success. 

When it comes to team meetings, leaders need to develop a process they can rinse and repeat, says Lauren Green, executive director of MeetingMakers, a meeting training and advisory service. How often a team meeting should be held depends on the topic's importance and scope. In an online interview, she notes that in most cases a team meeting should be held at least once a week. "However, many teams prefer to do a 15-minute daily tag up for updates." 

Successful meetings require significant prep time, which is often an unaffordable luxury amid the global IT workforce shortage, observes Dan Root, head of global strategic alliances at Barco ClickShare, a video conferencing technology provider. Meeting frequency should hinge on the scope of project or initiative. "A minimum cadence across the stakeholders should be established at the onset," he advises in an email interview. 

To ensure that all team members are aware of incremental project progress, it's important to relay regular updates to stakeholders, Root says. "Weekly team meetings will keep team members aligned on the project's goals and progress." Meanwhile, ad hoc meetings may be required to address urgent issues or new opportunities. "This approach ensures that team members remain focused, agile, and have the ability to leverage collaboration tools to maximize meeting effectiveness." 

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Weekly sessions may be too frequent for real progress to be assessed, suggests Ola Chowning, a partner at technology research and advisory firm ISG, via an email interview. Meeting cadence should reflect the speed of targeted objectives. "It's better to have multiple meetings on separate subjects with a clear cadence for each," she states. Such meetings will tend to be shorter in duration while addressing a clear goal. "Even daily team stand-up meetings should have a specific goal and agenda." 

Staying on Track 

Before a meeting begins, attendees should be alerted to the planned topic, goals, and anticipated outcomes, says Karan Ratra, an engineering leader at Walmart. "This becomes even more essential in a remote setup where the team members must use tools like Zoom or share virtual whiteboards to follow through [events] seamlessly," he explains, in an online interview. "Setting a specific goal, agenda, and topic before or at the beginning of the meeting is very critical to conducting a productive IT team meeting." 

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When planning a meeting, it's important to establish clear expectations for the group as well as individual attendees. Allow enough time for interaction but keep discussions in check to avoid veering off in tangents, Ratra advises. Delegate specific roles as needed up front. "Summarizing essential decisions will help team members stay focused." 

If the meeting is a daily tag up, time is of the essence. Set a ground rule for how long each attendee has to make comments, Green suggests. "Anything that isn't covered in that time gets moved to either a different meeting or can be tackled one-on-one," she says. For a weekly meeting, Green recommends asking each attendee to complete a template describing what they plan to accomplish during the upcoming week, and if they might need any special assistance. 

Management Matters 

A team leader should learn how to be a good moderator, says Rebecca Fox, group CIO at cybersecurity and managed services firm NCC Group. "You don’t have to be the boss to chair the meeting," she notes in an email interview. This is especially important when the items being discussed aren't limited to a single person. 

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Chowning advises against scheduling a long meeting each week to address multiple and often diverse topics. "Unless the agenda is crisply outlined in terms of subject, it's quite easy to run out of time to address later agenda objectives." She believes that team leaders should also guard against feeling the need to moderate meetings themselves. "Moderation is a skill, so choose the right moderator to keep meetings on track with objectives." In any event, the moderator should be able to articulate meeting objectives in definitive outcome terms while keeping the discussion in line with planned objectives, Chowning says. 

Biggest Blunder 

The biggest blunder IT leaders make is failing to hold any meetings. "Not bringing your people together is a huge mistake," Fox says. "You have to remember that not everyone likes to collaborate, but IT is getting more and more complicated, so the only way to fix things is to fix things together."