Too Many Hands In A Project

How to Ruin Web Design — The Design Curve is a simple and accurate view of what happens to a design when more people get involved in providing feedback and the time spent in changing the design. [Link from Web 2.0 Blog]

If you don’t read the rest of this entry — this picture tells all [Link from comment].

This concept also applies to meetings and projects. When I worked on a process team for a company, we started holding weekly meetings (or was it every other week?) to discuss process changes. The attendees included a handful of managers. The process worked great for over a year.

Then things changed. We took in another company and its software development team merged with ours. Now we had team members in three states. The process meeting slash teleconference attendees doubled and we accomplished less. Too many different ideas and opinions. It was tough to arrive to an agreement and we tabled many discussions for off-line discussions.

Not only did we have too many people involved, but also people who shouldn’t be attending the meetings. What’s more is that each process undergoing review had a sub-team. This worked well until we grew and the wrong people got assigned to those sub-teams. In the earlier days, it was easier to get the right people involved.

Part of the challenge to fix these problems is getting heard by the right people. Or they hear, but don’t consider the advice. Have you been able to convince decision-makers to change something? How did you make it happen? That was an area I struggled in when working in corporate USA.

[tags]project management,meetings,Meryl K. Evans[/tags]