Is There A Good Time For Meetings?

With many of us working remotely, number of meetings we have to attend has increased for almost every one. As many of us are missing opportunity of discussing things over a cup of coffee, or while banging into each other in office corridors, so we end up setting meeting for most topics. However, very often we go in a meeting and find that some of the key members have not joined. This becomes frustrating not only for the person who has setup the meeting, but also for other participants,  as this means they have to wait for another meeting and more time to arrive at decisions.

Is there a way we can improve attendance in meetings so that decisions can be made faster? 

Answer is yes. A carefully setup meeting has more chances that required attendees will join.  Convenience of the the time plays a major role in acceptance and attendance of a meeting.  

Most convenient time for meetings

As a general rule, we should avoid setting up meetings too early or too late during the day. When employees start their day, first think they have on their mind is to find out if there is any urgent issue which needs attention. We generally spend some time to browse through our mails first thing in the morning.  And while doing so, we also  plan our day for example setting up some important meetings with colleagues for the day, blocking some time to resolve an issue, or prepare some slide deck etc. Setting up a meeting as the very first thing to do for your colleagues, let us say at 8:30 am or 9:00 am is not a good idea. Most employees  usually use that time to plan their day. If they believe that the topic of meeting is not an urgent one, there are high chances that they might skip the meeting. 

Similarly late evening meetings should also be avoided. Towards evening people are usually in a rush or busy in concluding activities which they planned for that day. Setting up a meeting at the end of that day is like opening up new topics for them on which they can only act next day. Also by the evening, energy of employees is not at their peak levels, so there are chances that even they attend, they might not be very attentive or participative. No one wants a monologue during a meeting. 

How about mid day? energy levels are high during the day time when sun is up.  So best time to schedule a meeting is between 10:00 am to 04:00 pm ( excluding lunch time). Majority of people take lunch between 12:00 noon till 1:30 pm, so this time should also be avoided otherwise there is a risk that participants are thinking about food while you want them to think about something else. 

In a summary best slot for meetings are

10:00 am till 12:00 noon ( 2 hours window) 

01:30 pm till 4:00 pm  ( 2.5 hours window

Most convenient days for meetings

Are there some days when probability of people joining meetings is more? 

Yes there is more probability of people joining meetings in the middle of the week, i.e. Tue, Wed and Thu. 

Many a times people will want to club their leave with a weekend, so higher numbers of leaves are taken on a Monday or a Friday.  Therefore best days to schedule a meeting is Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. 

Most convenient duration of a meeting

Researches suggest that attention span for humans in one go ranges between 20 to 30 minutes. After 20 to 30 minutes of focussed attention, humans start to think about other things. Therefore one should try to conclude meetings in 30 minutes, or a maximum 45 minutes. Any meeting more than 45 minutes are can be counter productive ( unless topic is super exciting or urgent to retain attention of participants). If you know that your topic requires more then 45 minutes, it will be a good idea to keep a break in between. 

Other things to consider 

While scheduling a meeting, we should give some time for participants to accommodate / adjust their calendars. It is advisable to schedule meeting at least one day in advance if possible, as this will give participants an opportunity to adjust their calendars to accommodate your meeting request. 

With attention to small details about timings,  we can increase probability of higher attendance in meetings. Initially it will take some extra effort to plan meetings considering most suitable time of the day and week, but eventually it becomes become a habit which will be satisfying at-least if not rewarding in long run. 

Experience Management Matters

Businesses in today's fast paced technological evaluation face an ever growing challenge to remain competitive and relevant in the market. Today, as buyers are having more choices channels than ever before, it is important for enterprises to create differentiators from the rest. One of the important differentiator which helps enterprises to retain and grow their market share is Customer Experience. For example, a restaurant serving food in a quiet ambient surroundings will be providing Customer Experience at a different level from a restaurant serving food in a busy market place.  

In addition to the providing core product and service, businesses today are also focussing in provide value though better experience in order to achieve higher customer satisfaction. However, in absense of right instruments of feedback, there is a possibility that a company might believe that they are providing high experience value to customers, but customers might think other way. It is quite possible there might gaps in experience provided by the service provider and actual experienced perceived by customer. This delta is called Experience Gap. Businesses all around the globe lose billions in revenue due to poor customer experience.

How to improve customer experience? Traditionally businesses have been taking feedback from customers in form of surveys to understand the experience gap and take actions based upon the feedback received. Online surveys,  paper forms, short interviews etc. definitely have their importance and most conscious businesses use them. However in today’s world,  where individuals have time crunch more than ever before, it is difficult for businesses to receive enough feedback if at all from busy customers. Also,  many a times customer do not provide correct or honest feedback in order to save time,  but sometimes chooses to tick all questions without even reading them. 

But let’s not blame only customers here. We all have had been in situations like this, like  complaining a car service company when  your  car was not properly washer after servicing. After six months when you sent your car for next service you noticed the same issue again. Did you change your service provider or called up the workshop again? If no actions are taken by businesses on customer feedback, then eventually  customer either stops giving feedback or switch to another service provider. Sometimes back I was planning to purchased a new car. I checked many car showrooms in my locality before making up my mind to buy my car.  By now my hunt for a car was over, but natuarally I received follow-up calls from other showrooms whome I had visited before. Most of them stopped calling me once I told them about my car purchase. However there was a particular car dealer who kept calling me every couple of days until I blocked the agent's number. Somehow my status as a prospective customer was not changing in their system even after my providing this information several times.  Clearly their call centre  had a  disconnect from their customer information system,  resulting in sub optimal customer experience as well as employee disappointment.  

It is very important to integrate customer feedback data with operations data. With seamless integration of customer feedback or Experience Data ( X )  with Operations Data ( O ) immediate  actions can be taken to improve and adjust operations processes to incorporate customer feedback.  With X+ O integration business have opportunity of real time optimisation of  their operational processes based on customer experience data, which not  only improves operational efficiency but also customer experience.

What are the benefits and features of X + O Integration

Insight into Emotional Data:

Operational data only provides information about what is happening, however Experience data provides information of why it is happening. For example, businesses can understand why sales of a variant are down in a certain region or period. By analysing O + X data together businesses can take actions to address detractors in business operations.

Opportunity to get Customer feedback without asking:

Customer does not always say what they want to or what they dislike about a product, service or experience. By analysing operations and Experience data together, businesses can get insight into trends and indicators to understand which processes need to be addressed, and all this without chasing customers with time consuming survey forms.

Higher customer satisfaction:

With Realtime optimisation of processes,  based on insight from experience data, customers receive higher experience value during the whole cycle from inquiry to post sales activities. Higher experience for customers translates into higher revenue for business.

References:

https://www.sap.com/india/products/experience-management-xm.html

https://www.qualtrics.com/au/experience-management/

Agile, A Double Edge Sword

Agile is a very useful development methodology especially for software development as it gives Project team, flexibility to incorporate early feedback from beginning till end of the project. Unlike Waterfall methodology it is not constrained with rigid phases and provides a good amount of flexibility to Project Managers and team. In waterfall methodology for instance, complete design has to be completed within design phase and any feedback on design from further phases cannot be easily incorporated as waterfall assumes that all phases will be completed in totality. Agile methodology on other hand is more realistic approach and provides flexibility to incorporate feedback throughout the project cycle. Agile methodology also gives flexibility to start early development even when the requirements are in process of gathering. For example, if requirements of only 20% features are known at the beginning of the project, then also team can start development of these portions in a sprint without waiting for 100% requirements to be available. As team can gathers remaining requirements, remaining features can be built in in later sprints, which also enable early feedback mechanism.

Ability to start project with partial availability of requirements is one of the greatest Power which Agile gives to Project Managers.  However this power has to be used with care by Project Managers, else this power can prove to be a weapon for self-destruction. Managers and scrum masters should not confuse partial requirements with incomplete requirements. When I say partial requirements, I mean that if a Team has to build an application which would have features 1 to 10; and if team has full understanding of requirements of feature 1 & 2 then team can start building feature 1 & 2, without waiting for finalization of requirements of all 10 features. However if team has let’s say only 20% clarity of requirements for features 1 & 2, then these requirements are still incomplete to start any development. Any attempt to start development of those features, for which requirements collection is not good enough will result in chaos, too much of rework and slippage of project timelines. Remember, doing development without fairly understanding requirements is like going on a hunt blindfolded. Managers may sometime find “Team Utilization” as a compelling reason to start early development even while requirements understanding is still in a very early stage, but they should remember that starting with incorrect and incomplete requirements will eventually result in too many reworks and productivity loss for rest of the project, which will add up to higher costs and delays. Managers also have to be careful that Agile Methodology should not be used as an excuse by customers or solution owners to give incomplete requirements.

Another difficult choice is whether to do design of backlog items within a sprint or before the sprint in which these backlogs have to be developed. Agile strongly suggests that before a team starts working on a backlog item in a sprint, they should have clear understanding of activities and tasks to be done including what classes and methods to be developed, etc. Team should also know how much time each activity will take, as Scrum Master has to match the effort required to complete the tasks with available capacity of the team. Before design is completed or at least high level design is complete, team hardy has an idea of what all classes and methods need to be written and what will be the exact effort. Only after designing is complete, team can provide a fair enough estimates. Thus it is very important that design is done in previous sprint for those backlog items which are to be developed in next sprint. If team is planning to do design in the same sprint then certainly there will be surprises and heart breaks and team will seldom meet its goals.

Agile methodology provides flexibility in execution with an objective to start early and also to get early feedback. Every methodology including Agile has its limitations or boundaries, If Agile is misused or over stretched and is used as an excuse for not writing clear requirements then consequences  will be disastrous for the project.

Waterfall vs Iterative vs Agile vs Scrum

In an attempt to bring out differences between various software development project methodology and concepts like SCRUM, Waterfall, Agile, iterative, etc., I have tried to present a summary of these methodologies at one place. I have tried to touch upon few ones as the list is very long-

Waterfall is the simplistic sequential development process mostly used in software development industry. In waterfall model, usually following phases in order-Requirements collection, Design, Development, Testing, Deployment.

In a waterfall model each phase can be visited only ones, but that hardly happens as in almost all projects once defects are discovered during testing or in any other phases it becomes necessary to go back to design and development or sometimes even to requirements collection phase. Good thing about waterfall is that it emphasizes on clearly defining the requirement at the beginning of the project and thus is more disciplined, however this also brings in inflexibility to accommodate changes as they come later.

Iterative waterfall model provides flexibility and mitigates Risk of late identification to some extent by breaking up the overall development into multiple similar sub-cycles of development. However as the aim of individual sub-cycles may not be to deliver part of working functionality but let say some technical components so still there is more risk compared to more Agile methodologies. Though after completing one cycle, there is some scope of rectifying bugs but this still lacks the advantage of early customer feedback as delivery is usually made at the end of the project.

Agile methodologies: Is a group of software development methodologies which provide flexible response to changes in comparison to traditional waterfall methodology. Agile developments are based on Adaptive planning and evolutionary development.

There are many agile methodologies. Most popular ones being-

Scrum: Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework which involves delivering of software in multiple chunks through several sequential or overlapping mini project lifecycles called sprints. As feedback is formally collected after each sprints so it gives advantage of identification of requirement mismatch issues early in the project. This approach also does not require all requirements to be finalized at the start of the project. Requirements for which details are known with enough clarity are attempted to be delivered in current sprints, for other sprints requirements can be detailed out as they come.

Extreme Programming (XP): XP emphasis on low cost of changes in requirement by having multiple short development lifecycle. It emphasis more on coding and minimizes documentation and formal processes to reduce the cost of change. Because as the changes do not require formal documentation hence there is a risk of scope creep.