In my current project, we have multiple different companies and public authorities work together. This creates the challenge of how to schedule meetings across all involved parties so that people actually have time for the meeting. This is especially difficult because of two things:
- The project involves several very busy people that have a full calender even before any project-specific meetings are scheduled.
- Calendars are not public across different parties which means that nobody has a full picture of the availability of all project members.
There are several ways to address this challenge, but I want to start with the ones that I see often, but that don’t work that well in my opinion:
Hijack an existing meeting to find a good time for another meeting
You might already have an idea why this is bad, but I want to elaborate a bit more on it:
- The people in the running meeting might not be exactly the same group of people that you need in the meeting you want to schedule.
- You steal time that might be needed for the actual content of the current meeting.
- The process that one person suggests a time, other people veto against it, propose a new time, veto against it, propose a new time, and so on, is very inefficient. And it becomes more and more inefficient the more people are involved in it up to a point where it will be very frustrating.
Send out polls for every meeting that you want to schedule
While I think this asynchronous solution is more efficient than hijacking other meetings, it is still very inefficient if you want to schedule a lot of meetings over time. Especially if you send out a date poll for every single meeting: People have to block the slots in their calendar and they can’t accept the same slot in multiple polls because otherwise they run the risk of collisions.
In addition, the first available time slot might be quite some time in the future, if multiple people with already congested calendars are involved in the poll.
Now, having talked about some anti-patterns – what are actually good solutions to the problem in my opinion?
Ask people when they have time
If you can’t look into people’s calendars, you might as well ask them when they have time. And I don’t mean a date poll for a single meeting. Instead, make a single poll with, say, 30-minute time slots from Monday to Thursday (don’t do meetings on Friday) and ask them whether they
- don’t ever have time in this slot
- can rearrange their calendar to make time for regular meetings during that slot, if needed
- have time for regular meetings during that slot
Afterwards, you have a full picture of the team availability and you can schedule your regular meetings like refinement, planning, review, retros, pm weeklys, whatever…
Block time for work meetings
The availability of everyone might still change over time. Therefore, also schedule weekly blockers for non-recurring meetings. This will allow the team to schedule meetings on short notice during these blockers, if the need to discuss something in more detail comes up in a daily or weekly. The blocker should then be changed to the particular meeting, describe the topic and goal as well as who is needed and who is optional as described in Please host productive meetings.