Status Report #1 Meetings

Date: 12.05.2018

1. Status

Most of the team is familiar with each team member in terms of communication and work styles. Some members of the team has developed relations not only in work & class domain but also daily life as well. Our team developed strong meeting habit where most of us participates almost all meetings. We have a healthy meeting style where every one is open to express their thoughts and feelings. Mostly, we have thorough meeting reports which captures in meeting dialogues well while including some external material about the content we are discussing. There are some issues on the effectiveness of our meetings including the bindingness of the decisions made in meetings and also clarity of the decision made in meetings. There are some concerns on the flow of the meeting including skimming of the status section and also skimming of the actions section due to the tiredness caused by lengthy discussions. Lately as a trend, we see a problem of producing meeting reports and we see a loss of interests in meetings due to the everyones workload.

2. Acquirements

• 2.1. Everyone is open to listen and understand each other's viewpoint. There is a clear and healthy form of meeting and discussion style which builds the fundamental communication necessary for any project.
• 2.2. There is a strong habitual routine of following meetings which is necessary to track and plan our works.
• 2.3. One of the things that explicitly went well in the meetings is in-team collaboration and review. That is, everyone who had difficulty understanding or realizing a task assigned to her could ask the unclear points to other teammates. Also, when someone did a good job, it was acknowledged in the meeting, which gave a feeling of appreciation and belonging.
• 2.4. Specific Agenda section provides useful insights about the challenges the team faces on that specific moment.
• 2.5. Through Discussion section captures the essence of ideas that will be the key points in decisions made in meetings and also throughout the week. The reasons of the most of the Actions are tried to be justified. Discussion items provides a useful set of observations, thoughts and things done which can be referenced and which can guide the process of the team on various cases.
• 2.6. Additional Resource section includes beneficial content to gain knowledge and track the team tools.

3. Difficulties

• 3.1. Determining specific and clear Action items is necessary for a stable and healthy workflow for the week following. Some of the Action items we decided on are vague and unclear.
• 3.2. Status section is unused due to the poor usage of the Worklog. Therefore, tracking of the status of the team is not feasible.
• 3.3. Flow of the meeting sometimes feels overwhelming and unproductive. The unclear nature of the stages of the meeting accompanied with zig-zag of the topics considered causes an exhaustion.
• 3.4. Late production of the Meetings is a problem that effects whole workflow of the week. Without a Meeting document, the work to be done and decisions made are unclear.
• 3.5. Most of the meeting documents we prepare virtually are useless due to poor adaption from the team. We don't use, read, refer, check meeting documents. Meetings are meant the determine our decisions, work separation, work timing and guide through the labor of the project via these.

4. Suggestions

• 4.1. Meetings style should be reconsidered and determined more precisely. Stages of the meetings should be more concrete and the open nature of the meetings should be more regular and ordered. There may be a round robin like structure where speaking is shifted among team members where all team members focus on one person speaking. One of the team members should lead the meeting with a sense of general control and coherence. Each team member can write their ideas and feelings to express them later on when the discussion arrived the related point instead of the present moment and prevent the zig-zaggy discussions.
• 4.2. To produce meeting documents more faster, we may assign backup document writers and avoid the problems associated with one person's busyness. Another suggestion would be a system where we establish a meeting leader mentioned in 4.1 which is also responsible of taking notes and preparing the meeting document. We can choose the team leader before each meeting depending on everyone's workload.
• 4.3. Adoption and usage of the meeting documents should be encouraged more. There is a reason why we enumerated the meeting documents, which is the need of reference to the decisions, discussion and ideas we had on meetings. Therefore, we have to read, interact and refer to meetings more and more. Let's use meeting documents more interactively to guide through our project workflow and make meeting document a fundamental entity of our project which records our state of mind and status of the work.
• 4.4 Apart from referring to the meeting document, we should also edit it in case of some issues discussed or some decisions taken in the meeting are forgotten by the individual who prepared the meeting document. There may be cases where more elaboration or clarification needed for ease of further review and understanding of the content of the meeting which is an another possible editing reason. We are a team, this means we should connect to each other, correct each other's shortcomings and learn from each other's strong points.