Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Refining concerns / needs in a timely way

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Guy Koehler <rancher [at] rivendell-ranch.com>
is the author of the message below. 
It was posted by Fred the Cohousing-L list manager <fholson [at] cohousing.org> 
because the message included HTML ;      PLEASE do not post HTML, see
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This may or may not work in this environment. It worked very well for me
in my first year as a program manager of a bunch of developers. I began by
running meetings democratically. Each individual was encouraged to share
their week's progress report to th e entire group. These meetings were
taking 2-3 hours to complete, the reuslt being that my most valuable
people were getting up and leaving. 

My solution was to require that individuals make their reports to their
team leads against the spec and schedule, which detailed what should have
been done that week. All of this was done via email. The only things that
filtered up to me were red flags (i t was blocking the completion of the
spec that week) and yellow flags (if not dealt with, it would become a red
flag). Quantitative changes to the spec were red flags. 

The team meeting was reduced from 20 people taking 4 hours, to 3 people
taking 10 minutes. All of the work that was being drug through in the team
meeting was being done by individuals with their respective teams, in the
specification by those individuals responsibility for a given area, and in
the schedule; all by email and/or small groups as they deemed appropriate. 

Every meeting that I have attended which had more than 6 people in it,
became a talking contest rather than a working meeting. Groups seem to
invite discussion, thus turning simple work items into long adventures. 


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