Overview

A meeting is a gathering of the entire design team that ensures everyone's work and thinking processes are well-synchronized.

Team projects require both highly collaborative work and highly individual work. The worst thing that can happen is to let the individual work unravel the overall goals of the team. Meetings are necessary because they let the individual team members stay connected to each other, keep their work in sync, and ensure common goals are met by everyone. Meetings keep everyone from “wandering off.”

Meetings keep a team coordinated, and leverage the overall synergy and wisdom of the team. However, meetings that are held too often or are poorly executed become only a dead weight that consumes valuable time and effort of all team members.

There are two kinds of meetings.

Regular Meetings

These are regularly scheduled, every week, and are intended to

update the team on each member's recent progress,
seek input and advice on questions and problems arising from recent work,
adjust scheduling to ensure all short- and long-term goals will be met, and
plan and assign tasks for the following week.

Regular meetings should be short and always focussed on the task at hand. If you want to socialize, set aside time after the meeting to do that. Business before pleasure. Regular meetings may be as short as 15 minutes and should never go over 30 minutes, unless a serious problem is uncovered during the meeting.

Special Meetings

These are meetings called with short notice to treat unforeseen and significant problems. While it would be best if such meetings are never needed, they will be needed, sooner or later. Special meetings shouldn't last more than 90 minutes. If they do, you should consult your instructor about the problem you're having. There's nothing wrong with asking for help; there's a lot wrong with just spinning your wheels and wasting time and effort.

Special meetings must address only the problem for which they were called, and they are over as soon as a decision on how to address the problem has been accepted by all team members.

For instance, say one team member realizes that a particular part is not available in the required size. This could be a “showstopper” for the whole project. That team member needs to get in touch with the entire team immediately and schedule a Special Meeting to address that problem, and that problem alone.

How to run meetings

Planning a meeting

Weekly meetings should be established during the kickoff meeting. Find a day and time when everyone can normally attend. Hold the weekly meeting even if everything is running well. It may be that the meeting runs only five minutes; that's fine.

You are advised to not have your weekly meetings at the end of the day. You will be too tired and in too much of a rush to get to the TTC/GO to focus well on the meeting.

Choose a location for your meetings where you can focus and concentrate on the matter at hand without distraction or interruption. Make sure everyone on the team knows where that location is.

You can use Zoom or Google Meet to hold meetings.