Coffee Meetings

Communication is essential for a project to be successful. Unfortunately, most people interpret this need as an excuse to reduce the rain forests by the production of mountains of memo's, reports, newsletters, charts, drawings, and so on. There are always alternatives. There is always another way of doing things. What we did was to all have a coffee break together at 10:00 and 15:00 where we would all stop working and gather round to discuss issues, progress, solve problems, and generally complain. Nothing became bottled up since there was always an opportunity to say your piece and they were very informal, sort of an 'unstructured stumblethrough'. After a while I felt that my presence was no longer needed and so I only attended if asked. As the project progressed the meeting died off until we felt the need for them again.

The second time round for the coffee meetings was when we were starting work on the coding of a module the designer would 'talk' the rest of the project team through her design. This made sure that everyone was aware of what was happening and any design errors were highlighted.