When you posted this question, I had no success story to tell. Now I have a partial success story.

For some months now, I've been on a new group of just a small number of people (varying from 4 to 7 depending on the active project). The culture was for lot's and lot's of verbal status and work meetings. It is now more about adhoc collaboration in doing work and written status. We make sure to get a status of our own action items (or those items we are responsible for tracking) prior to meeting for discussion or performing work in groups. This eliminates the usual spate of questions about what work is done and what work needs doing, and it encourages the attitude that meeting is for discussing late items, roadblocks, next steps, and other things we all need to decide on or discuss as a group.

This situation has not extended to our supervisor, unfortunately. He still prefers to do everything verbally in status meetings of the type that means we do not move toward any objectives during the meeting beyond each person describing what is already in writing: what work is complete and what work is ahead of us. To combat this over time, we still send out written status descriptions with a large amount of detail. This way, when we have another one of the apparently wasteful status meetings, we continually refer to the contents of the documents we already wrote and distributed, making sure to specifically state that we are repeating what our document already states. Also, because we do already have it in writing, we as the working members of the project(s) try using the time to discuss things that move toward our projects' goals, rather than just repeat the status everyone already knows.

This is marginally effective with people that have a certain style of micromanagement that our current supervisor uses, but at least we feel like we aren't completely wasting our time on every meeting - just most of the ones with our supervisor, unfortunately.

Time will still tell whether this makes a difference, but it's all good practice for us to use our time more effectively.

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Jesse Trucks, GCIH, GCUX
jesse@cyberius.net