| Author: | Stephen J. Turnbull |
|---|---|
| Organization: | Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems at the University of Tsukuba |
| Contact: | Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> |
| Date: | August 10, 2020 |
| Copyright: | 2020, Stephen J. Turnbull |
| Topic: | Research |
I will be requiring work products before meetings to help ensure that meetings are productive.
A work product is the tangible output of effort. Some work products are required to be submitted by a client, such as homeworks and papers required for a university degree. Others are intermediate goods such as "to do" lists and meeting agendas, or tools such as data cleaning scripts. In most cases for researchers in business and economics a work product is a document or a fragment of a document. (Fragments are things like fixing a bug in a program which changes only a few lines, and updating a to do list by checking off completed items and adding new requirements to incomplete items.)
You should prepare work products for all meetings. You should always have an agenda, a list of tasks to be accomplished in the meeting. For meetings of more than two or three people, normally one person or a small committee will set an official agenda. (These people are very powerful! By keeping an item off the agenda, you can effectively veto it.) But for very small meetings, each person will have their own agenda.
Agenda items include
For now I want everyone to provide an agenda by email for individual consultations. It doesn't need to be very formal, just an explanation of what you plan to discuss in the text of the email. Each item should distinguish whether it is a report or a question/request. The email should be sent 24 hours before your meeting time.
Reports will often be supported by documentation: full paper drafts, partial drafts, presentation slides, etc. Whether documentation is necessary depends on the content of the report. Questions and requests for others normally do not have documentation. One exception is a request for review of a document, obviously you need to supply the document. Documentation should be provided well in advance of a meeting. For most items of most meetings, 24 hours is enough. For large work products such as a draft of a complete thesis, several days, preferably a week, should be allowed. (For comparison, in the case of a paper submitted for publication in a journal or at a conference, typically 6-8 weeks are allowed for review.)
Documentation often is provided in multiple forms. For example, with a paper draft, the author may also provide the slides for a presentation as well as a handout containing a few detailed tables or images that don't fit a slide presentation well, source code for a program, or even a full dataset. When documentation comes in several parts, the submission deadlines may vary. For example, if you submit a paper for review, that needs to be very early, but the slides for your presentation may be needed only a day or two in advance.