For almost 10 years I am engaged in web development and still no project is like the other. Evey project has it’s own character and brings a lot of new people you have to deal with during development. And I think exactly that is what makes the business so interesting. Every new individual you get to know brings another challenge with it. Right from the initial meeting with new contact persons you have to find a common language and synchronize your thoughts so that everybody is following the same objectives. To support your client/contractor communication and your time of project preparation I have crafted a short checklist/questionnaire[1] which aims to make your life as a web consultant easier.

The day the world turned crazy

It’s just incredible how easy it is to walk into the same trap over and over again. You are preparing for a nice initial meeting with a potential customer and during all the preparations you develop some kind of storyboard in your mind which describes what you think the meeting will be like. After hours of work the appointment finally arrives and you are really looking forward to start a solid business relationship with your new client. But then it hits you out of nowhere. Right after the first two minutes into your conversation your wonderful prophecy falls apart. It gets twisted and crushed before you even notice whats going on. Your conversation did not work out as you expected at all. All your effort crushed within several minutes.

Signs to look out for

My case which I am referring to had some clear indicators of turbulence which I should have been aware of. It was so obvious that this is not going to be a fabulous meeting. Surely I have attended many meetings but never have I seen that crazy combination of conversation-breakers before.

So there was that last business meeting which is the cause for this very blog post. Originally it was intended to be a meeting between a potential new client company CEO and me. We were going to talk about a possible website relaunch and new marketing strategies. Little did I know that my brain was going to be raped. Look out for the quotes to follow my story about a literal brainstorm.

• Location is everything

  Look out for a location which does not cause too much distractions from your conversation. Best is a small, quiet room which is separated from normal business activities with a table and seats for all participants. Personally I do not like to meet at public venues that much as there usually happens to be a lot of background noise. You also can’t be sure about who is overhearing your conversation on outside places. Sadly you do not have much influence on the location if you are invited to your clients place. You can make an art out of choosing and preparing the perfect location. A while ago I was attending a really interesting workshop about how to negotiate where we talked about aspects of meeting locations which you probably would never think of in normal life.

I was invited into a meeting room full of people. One big table which happened to host our meeting and some technicians working on notebooks on some internal project at the other end of the table. Hello trouble, here I come.

• Unexpected participants and uninvited spectators

  Make sure to invite all the needed persons and to introduce all partaking individuals. In my opinion it is really important to know who is attending a meeting. If there is a complete stranger sitting at the table of whom I don’t even know the name I really get cautiaus during conversation. You never know if you are going to offend your partners with what you are saying but in my opinion chances that you do are exorbitantly higher if you don’t know anything about the conversation partners. It’s also helpful to remove all unneeded individuals from the meeting location.

You remember the working technicians I was talking about? Turns out they were even partially following our conversation with one ear and giving quite inappropriate input from time to time. And then there was another participant I firstly thought happened also to sit silently across the table and working on his notebook. Turns out it was a mid-level executive spontaneously joining our conversation. At the beginning of the meeting everyone in the room was introduced solely by name and job title.

• Agenda and purpose of the meeting

  It helps a lot to think about the topics you want to clarify during the meeting before you sit down at the table. Everybody should be aware of the purpose of the meeting. It also is helpful to document all important decisions during the meeting. Even if you just write down short footnotes on your printed agenda draft. Following the agenda in the order on your printout is not really important in my opinion. Often the flow of the conversation results in a different order. But you can use the agenda to check if no important topic has bee left out.

I had prepared a nice agenda which I intended to follow during the meeting. Sadly the unexpected visitors had no clue about the purpose of our meeting and to some agree felt left out which caused many spontaneous discussions (even with the initially not involved technicians) about quite useless topics at that time (e.g. which CMS to use, etc.) which would have been quite useful in a later phase of the project but not at the given moment. I guess some persons were offended at a deeper level as they apparently have not been informed about my assignment as web consultant who was going to mess with their baby. Sadly I also did not define any goals for the meeting which just stopped at one point without any clear outcome for myself. The client was mostly pleased with my theoretical work but we just separated in the fashion of “Thanks for the effort. We’ll call you when we’re ready.”

• Responsibilities and fields of expertise

  It is very good to know which person on the table is responsible for what and each ones expertise. That way you don’t happen to be more clever than an attending expert in his field of expertise. Within any project you have to assign clear responsibilities to the according people and to clarify each ones weight on decisions.

I think it was an insane  mixture of all the previous and following points which lead to a quite unpleasant talking experience. The employees did not know about me getting involved with their website. They had no idea of what we were discussing that day.  People involved with application server maintenance thought I was going to relocate servers and to force them to integrate half of their applications right into the website. Without any chance to prepare for the meeting they just happened to pick up some phrases now and then and join in with discussions about topics which had absolutely nothing to do with what we were talking about. I was marked as intruder into their territory and was met with constant distrust.

Another strategy by mid-management. Everything I said was conquered with the exact opposite opinion  (besides the tendency to turn around another 180° 5 minutes into the discussion). Everything I suggested was instantly demonized and cursed.

The highlight with no doubt was the discussion about CMS right in the beginning of the meeting. I was talking about how it would probably make sense to switch CMS. Basically I was suggesting to see what we want to achieve with a new website and then choose the CMS which would fit best for the tasks or even develop our own custom solution. Immediately mid-management agreed with me but told me about the experience with other CMSes in previous companies which were all better than the current solution in place. Also quickly came a suggestion to consult a close friend whose company has written it’s own CMS and which would provide us their CMS for little money. The circle of technicians on the other side wanted to know which CMS I would suggest. Foolish as I was I really answered with two CMS I tend to use frequently. (Reminder to self: NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!) What followed was a long discussion about many aspects of CMS and technologies in general. Somehow I managed to finally stop the discussion there. I suggested to roll back to the start and to shortly look over the topics of the prepared agenda and to have deeper discussions later.

• Preparation and vocabulary

  For future reference I have compiled a short checklist/questionnaire[1] which will help me to ask my client basic questions without to go into any technical details too early. It’s all about basic projects goals and fundamental strategies. It also defines a set of basic vocabulary which everyone in a discussion can relate to. Talking about the same things in different terms and phrases really is tiresome.

What I can tell you from my last experience is that it does not help if you try to make people clear that you have the same goals that they have. I guess they just don’t have enough time to evaluate all your claims and switch to some kind of defense mechanism. It does not matter if you state that you want to work together with them on the project and to realize the needed changes as smooth as possible. What counts is that all participating individuals are on the same level of information. That is what the website project checklist can be used for. You can use it as a reminder of points you have to clarify to do your work properly or with certain clients you can even let them play around with it in advance.

What can you do about it?

In the long run we will most likely experience this phenomenon more than once in our lifes. For me the motto is to stay calm and be professional (now that I know the outcome of the way I reacted that time). At least I am going to have a great story afterwards. In that case I don’t take this (probably) missed opportunity too serious. I think of it as a great opportunity to improve my own personality. I do not blame the client for anything. It was my pure lack of similar meetings which made me lose track and to just follow the whole discussion rather passively. I simply was overwhelmed by the attending people and disoriented by many confusing discussions. Discussions I for me thought would be obvious to hold later – but which I failed to communicate to the others.

Next time I’ll try to react differently if a similar situation occurs.

• Agenda and purpose of the meeting

I had clearly formed an agenda to follow during the meeting. Sadly we happened to not follow it exactly as happened to lose our way

I’ll ask each person in the room in detail about their job position and their anticipation and role within the upcoming project before we start talking about project details.

I’ll introduce everyone in the room to the agenda we are going to work through and the exact purpose of the meeting.

I’ll think about decisions and results I want to have at the end of the meeting before the meeting starts and ways on how to get there.

I’ll try to cut out useless discussions which have absolutely no relevance to the topics on the agenda.

All in all I hope to show more professionality when dealing with a similar situation in the future.

What are your strategies to deal with inconvenient occurences during meetings?

[1] Checklist for Website Projects can be downloaded at my company website (direct link to the PDF, about 330kB)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 22:42 and is filed under technology and has . The entry is tagged with checklist, request for comment, Sybermon, web service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.