Where do multi-hour meetings for 50 people come from?

When starting work on a new project, our team usually requests basic information to get a general idea of the planned and current situation. Often, when it comes to finding out the status of the work, after our requests to provide us with reports, we are asked "not to waste time sorting through papers, but to attend the meeting" at which this project is discussed. In most cases, more than 20 people are present at such a meeting (and in the case of megaproject - more than 50), and it lasts several hours. The chairperson (be it the General Director, Project Manager or another management representative) begins the meeting with a question like "How are we doing?", after which all participants begin to consistently (or not so) talk about the state of affairs in their area of responsibility. Their reports are interrupted by questions that turn into arguments. These disputes end with a shout from the elder, after which an order is issued such as "Understand and report." Minutes are not always kept at such meetings.

It is obvious that the productivity from lengthy debates at such meetings (where there is often no goal to find the truth, but the goal is to shift responsibility) is extremely low. And it is also obvious that the cost of these meetings for a company or project (calculated by simply adding the labor costs of the participants multiplied by the cost of an hour of their work), on the contrary, is very high. And one day, coming out of such a three-hour meeting, my team and I asked ourselves a question: why is this not the most effective and very expensive method of communication so popular all over the world and in all industries?

One of the main responsibilities of any project manager or megaproject - make management decisions (correct if possible). In order to accept them, you need to be sufficiently immersed in the situation on the project and ensure the integration of various functional areas (reduce and ensure complementarity of information flows). You can immerse yourself in the situation by debugging project management processes (including those related to planning, monitoring and reporting). In this case, during the implementation of the project, the manager will regularly receive objective information necessary for decision-making. Such an integrated system will work if project management processes are clearly described, participants in these processes are trained and instructed, clear templates are developed for participants to fill out, the necessary automation is introduced, and also if regular audits of the implementation of processes are carried out, allowing them to be adjusted to a more effective level.

However, unfortunately, often the processes of project management are poorly established; management (including megaprojects) is carried out "impudently" and based on the personal experience of the participants. In this case, the manager receives fragmentary information from various functional areas (often contradictory to each other). Intuitively, the manager understands that he does not have the whole picture to make decisions, and uses the most primitive method of integration and immersion in the situation - a general mass gathering and consistent hearing of project participants. At such meetings, the manager is essentially saturated with information and forces his subordinates to exchange it (due to the lack of opportunity to do this on a systematic, regular basis).

You can also often observe a strange situation at first glance - members of the project management team scold such meetings, their duration, uselessness, but they willingly attend them (and worry if they are cancelled). This happens because representatives of functional areas have a conscious (or not) need to integrate the management process - it is important for them to understand what is happening with their "neighbors" on the project, and based on this information, adjust their work.

Do such meetings help make correct management decisions? Often not. The information received is unsystematic, insufficient, and unverified.

Does this mean that representative meetings are an ineffective tool in principle? Of course not. Such meetings can be very effective for purposes such as:

acceleration of notifications: within the shortest possible period of time, eliminating repeated calls and long correspondence, familiarize all interested parties with the current topic;
acceleration of surveys and feedback: the ability to quickly find out the opinions of all interested parties on an issue of interest - during the debate and participants defending their points of view, the strongest position can be determined;
acceleration of approvals (this reduces the possibility of sabotage of approvals, which is common during correspondence);
prompt resolution of urgent controversial issues;
recording and subsequent tracking of the execution of orders; instructions formulated at the meeting are included in the minutes and in the Instruction Control Journal, after which the person responsible for carrying out the assignment does not have the opportunity to refer to the fact that he was not notified about it in a timely manner;
etc.

Thus, it can be confirmed that meetings (even with large numbers of participants) are an effective tool if used as intended.

And if such meetings are held to determine the status of work on the project or megaproject, this suggests that there are serious problems in management processes - especially in integration management and communication management. To determine the status and make effective management decisions, well-established project management processes with regular audits and, if necessary, making adjustments are much better suited.