daily check in meeting.

The team I inherited had a daily meeting for the whole development organization (18 people or so).  I did not find this to be very effective and have since broken it up into 3 separate 15 minute AM meetings.

Overall, I think the meetings are good if you have a team of people who are working on tasks that have significant inter-dependencies.  For instance, one of our daily meetings is for project work.  It loosely follows the scrum methodology for daily meetings (see http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/daily-scrum). 

I have found that if it helps the team improve communication and collaboration, than it is a positive.  In this case, your role is more facilitator, not direction giver.  A good check is are folks talking to you in the meeting or each other.  You want them interacting with each other.

Using a daily meeting to "manage" your team and their priorities is not effective.  Use O3s and delegation to handle this and you will be better off.

As for the 3 meetings we have now, I only expect the project ones to still be in existence in the months ahead.

Hope that helps,

Mike

ps.  I have read Death by Meeting.  I enjoyed it, but did not find it very helpful.  The MT "running a meeting" advice, plus the trinity is much more actionable.

I had to actually implement twice daily meetings recently because our department was in the middle of running operations on the H1N1 influenza. We had to have these meetings to keep up on the recommendations and guidelines that were being issued and reissued on almost an hourly basis. It was the only way that I felt as a department we could keep up with what our agency needed to know. We have 2 offices, located 30 minutes apart, so all staff were required to either attend, or teleconference to these 1/2 hour meetings. Calls were pouring in all day long to the entire department, so the nurses and staff needed to have a very short leash on that information flow. I could not afford to have the schools, clinics and hospitals that rely on us for clinical guidance be given stale advice. I also implemented an intercom "code H" which meant, nurses, check your e-mail for new guidelines! This kept us all on top of the information.

This was a temporary situation, but necessary because of the extremely high risk nature of the work. We do not have them at this time, because the information and guidance changes are very much decreased. Though my team detests meetings, they cited these as vital to keeping their knowledge pertinent.

This may not be your situation, but it worked for a specific task that was very high risk for error and embarrassment to the agency.

It depends on what you are meeting about.  Jan is right  about "crisis mode" meetings.  When events are moving quickly, or a project has run off the rails and needs to be brought back on track, daily meetings can be very useful.  

Some projects, like those using SCRUM methods, have daily meetings as standard practice.  

Other projects, with experienced teams, don't need the daily meetings, as team members reach out to others as needed to keep things moving, and the status/checkins are done weekly (or whatever).  

Daily meetings don't scale well to larger groups.  

John Hack

 Part of our corporate culture and QA requirements are to have daily meetings with the entire staff. They're quick ten minute get-togethers where a service lesson is shared and we get input from everyone.  When I got onboard, they were very inconsistent, and the team frankly hated them.  But my regional stressed their importance, and a QA check is lurking to happen any moment, so we implemented them on a consistent basis.  I have noticed many positive changes.  The obvious is that people who rarely came into contact with each other now know each others names.  People receive the same information, the same little lesson on service and professionalism, and it gives us an opportunity to discuss our performance as an organization.  In the past month, department ratings have increased across the board.  I also want to stress that the change happened when they became consistent, because then the message got across that this was important, everyone had to participate, and the staff saw that I cared about what they needed and how we were progressing as a team.  

Vadim,

We have a daily 15 minute stand up meeting. We started it 3 months ago and it is now starting to get some rhythm. We run a beverage factory and 6 key people meet every morning. 3 managers from processing areas, a project coordinator, a support engineer and myself. I am the plant manager.

Each process area takes 2 minutes to go through what happened yesterday, their current status and plans for today. Major downtime on equipment are taken up separately and each process owner is required to have an action plan for that day.

The first few weeks saw participants coming without being prepared, however this has changed and the meeting is peppier and more effective.

I have found that increasing the frequency of meetings and keeping tight schedules has worked very well for me. We solve more problems than before. We also have a weekly meeting with mostly the same participants. I no longer have a monthly meeting. The monthly meeting used to run on and on and simply did not work.

Hope this helps. Give it a try, or let us know what your context is, perhaps we can provide guidance which will more pertinent to your situation.

Frankie

We're a global, project-based organization and were having a problme with issues taking too long to resolve.  We would discuss an issue in a weekly project meeting, agree on an action plan, and then if that didn't work, sometimes a whole week would go by, till the next weekly meeting.  Since we needed action in hours or days rather than a weekly time frame, we instituted a daily issues meeting.  The person who runs the meeting keeps things very tight.  The issue owner gives a quick update on the issue, what action they have taken to get it resolved, and then since the whole management team is on the phone we discuss other resouces or help that could be provided.  It is all logged in a spreadsheet and issues remain in the log until resolved.  We don't review every project, only those that are yellow, red, or have an issue that the PM thinks requires cross-organizational help is needed.  I was skeptical at first (oh no, not another meeting!) but because they meetings are so well run, they really do help get things done.  And we never take more than 10 to 30 minutes.    Our PMs have come to rely on this management/sponsorship resource.