Planned and Unplanned Meetings in Large-Scale Projects

To succeed with large-scale projects, teams need to coordinate ideas and efforts, which is a core purpose of meetings. We conducted a case study in a large software company where we observed meetings and surveyed 65 members working in large-scale agile projects in Poland, Norway and China. Our results show that employees in the large-scale projects spend, on average, a total of 13.5 hours per week in meetings. The employees spend somewhat more time in ad hoc conversations and unscheduled meetings than they do in scheduled meetings. The majority work in distributed teams, and the size of distributed teams is significantly larger than that of co-located teams. Successful meetings in large-scale projects are critical. We propose a theory of coordination by feedback, which can be used as a basis for future research on meetings in agile software development.