I was in a meeting a few days ago where we were discussing the schedule for the upcoming release of my product. To my knowledge, everyone in the room already knew what the schedule was, but we have an internal wiki that we use to track release dates and that page had TBD in several slots, hence the meeting. What was really driving the meeting was that members of the exec team had different dates in their heads and when this came to light, there was an immediate scramble to get everything reconciled.
I sat back in the meeting and observed as a little dance emerged. I did this because I was frustrated that we were even having this meeting. The schedule had already been discussed in detail many times. But I digress….
First, the latest schedule was written up on the white board. The dates which were known were entered into the matrix. Then each participant (ENGR, QA, etc) was asked about how much time was needed for each stage. As we inserted the new dates, it became apparent that the release calendar was way off what we had discussed previously. And by way off, I mean quarters, not weeks.
Obvious to everyone in the room, the new release date would not be a workable one, so we erased the dates and went through the exercise again. The second time, we came up with a slightly different date, but one that was nowhere near where it was expected. So, we did it again.
At the third go ’round, tempers were starting to get a bit heated. We wrote certain assumptions about the release calendar on the board so that we were all working from the same baseline. We discussed the immovable GA date and what could be done in parallel. We discussed how to get additional resources temporarily involved in order to reduce the load on certain teams during high usage periods of the release cycle.
We finally came up with a schedule that everyone in the room (more about that in a bit) felt workable. We wrote the dates on the white board and everyone agreed to them, granted there were no substantial variations introduced between now and the GA date. I copied down all of the details from the white board so that we could communicate the plan to the exec team.
Sadly, the new dates were almost identical to the dates that I’m sure everyone already knew before the meeting started. We spent the better part of the hour coming up with the same dates that we had going in to the meeting. But now everyone knew and agreed to the schedule (I’d argue that was the case before, too).
The meeting wasn’t a total wash. I learned two valuable lessons–
- The farther apart your goals are, the more likely you will be able to negotiate them to be closer
- It’s OK to come out of a meeting with the same information you went in with if it brings unity
