Thursday 7 May 2009

Online meeting 7 May 2009



Activity - Meeting to review a number of software projects being developed

Participants - 3 software development company team members, 2 client participants, 1 consultant 

Technologies - skype www.skype.com was used as a telephone conferencing tool, yuuguu http://www.yuuguu.com was used to webshare the consultant's screen who was acting as facilitator.

The facilitator shared the screen showing the agenda. The agenda had previously been sent out using outlook as a meeting invite. 

Joining the meeting - participants were given a skype in number to dial which was a normal uk phone number. As each member joined they were added to the conference in Skype. The 3 people from the software company were sitting in an office in Louth around a speaker phone, the consultant in Grimsby and 1 client in Hull. One thing I have noticed about skype is that it doesn't do the announcement "Mr Smith has joined the meeting" I miss that although I guess it does save some money on phone calls and often the call quality is better. The last partipant, located in York, I instant messaged on Yuuguu and asked him to phone at a conveniant point so that he could join in the meeting about 30 minutes in.

I sent a link to the Yuuguu site and pin number via Yuuguu to all the participants except one who I e-mailed (they have Yuuguu but it has stopped working for them)

During the meeting
I started to share my screen and showed the agenda. 

As we discussed certain solutions I showed the particular screen shot that related to it on screen. This seemed quite useful as we were all looking at the same thing. 

In contrast at one point we discussed another document that 2 particpants had printed and I didn't have a copy. They each had something that looked different it transpired after about 5 minutes of discussion. 

On a different point it was quite distracting when I moved off the main screen to add a note to something else. I learned to use the pause button in Yuuguu which keeps the screen at time of pasuing in view while you go off and do something else.

Feedback

I spoke to two particpants after the meeting who both said they found it really productive. They also said that it would have:

  • Benefited from having all documents shared, the same version in a shared workspace
  • Been useful to be able to note actions on screen as we agreed them
  • Seen all the agenda on one screen







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