How many meetings does it take

to screw in a light bulb?

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Before you read this, read this post from Cam Minges (excerpt below):

A good read is Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. Since Jeff and I had four hours to kill on our way home from St. Louis, we decided to tackle this subject. Originally, it was about meetings but then we couldn't agree between meeting hell and project management. So, we decided to tangle them up together to see what happens.

Warning: This Blog Post is meant to poke a little fun at our two favorite subjects. It's meant for entertainment purposes.

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I’m not sure either. Let’s schedule a meeting to discuss it, Cam. How about tomorrow? Oh you’re busy then – you say you’ve already got a meeting scheduled at that time? We’re going to have to schedule a meeting to talk about all these meetings we’ve been having lately.

Project Charter Meeting: We’ve changed the topic of this post several times already. Cam thinks it should be about meetings and light bulbs. I’d like to focus on project management and comedy, but mostly on the comedy. I wanted to stub it out by sections, Cam disagreed. We compromised on the later but we’re still unresolved about the overall direction. I’m sure we’ll have another meeting about this later on in the trip - though it will vaguely resemble something to do with a light bulb, I'm sure.

Risk Assessment Meeting: During the project charter meeting, I asked whether we should really be doing this, since some people (like the terrorists) might not think it’s funny. We decided to schedule a meeting to discuss the project risks. The risk of making a superior unhappy is probably a very real one and we decided it had a 50% chance of actually occurring and that we should deal with it early on. So please know as you’re reading this that this is merely a comment on… well… we really haven’t decided yet. I’ll let you know what it’s a comment on after we finish our project charter.

Task designation and estimation meeting: The first proposed task was to prototype several different brands and wattages of light bulbs to get the one that we like the best based on brightness, energy consumption, and cost. Cam volunteered to make some templates to benchmark the light bulbs. We figured it would take about 16 hours of researching light bulbs, about 8 hours to make the templates for benchmarking, and about 2.28263 hours to do the actual testing. It is important to note that these numbers are man hours, and not duration. We’ll pad these numbers with some time for quality assurance once we have an over all total. We both agreed this was a necessary step. Our meeting time ran out and we rescheduled for later.

Resource allocation meeting: Cam was 100% on driving and I was 80% on writing this entry for the duration of the trip. It looks like we’ll be outsourcing this project. We both agreed that this wasn’t ideal, but we couldn’t take on any more projects at the moment. At least we finished a meeting on time and actually came to an agreement.

Kickoff meeting: Cam declined his invitation. That’s it… that’s the funniest thing I could come up with. Neither one of us had ever been to a kickoff meeting where anything was accomplished. First item on the agenda for the next meeting: what’s a kickoff meeting?

That’s our project plan so far. I can’t write any more because after I logged my hours on my time sheet for all of this project management I realized we had sorely underestimated how much time the project management would take. We were already over budget and behind schedule from when we needed the light bulb changed. The first the thing Cam asked me was how this would impact the schedule of his project to get us home. Luckily it had minimal impact.

Conclusion: Looks like you’ll have to ask Mr. Owl.

Note: Thanks to Cam Minges for his guest appearance and taking care of all the receipts from our business trip.