Collaborative document for Standup and other meetings

At a company I worked at where we were all remote (distributed company), we used google doc for meetings. The mention of my using of g docs for todo list in the "How do you track issues, todos, features" thread reminded me that not everybody realise the power of collaborative editing.

At that particular company, one team started doing this, then as people moved from team to team, every team got on the bandwagon adding some improvements to the process. This is how we used it:

- for larger meeting, typically weekly, spend spend time before the meeting updating your section/chapter, eg: what your team's been doing

- for smaller meeting like daily standups, spend 5 minutes at the beginning of the meeting for everybody to add their chapter and bullet points of what they want to bring up

- spend the next 5 minutes of the meeting for everybody to review the document and add questions for the other members/teams

- proceed with the meeting in the order of the document giving time for the current speaker to let them highlight the points they want to and others to ask extra question

- as the meeting goes on, add/edit what's already written to create a valuable minute

Doing this allowed us to have faster and much more efficient meetings. Being to read the main points allowed us to spend time talking about the more important one while not missing the smaller ones, spending a few minutes writing things down means that you rarely forget what you want to talk about so don't have to go back to speakers who already had their turn, the document is an instant minute needing very little editing to make it readable and useful and requiring no time to be spent on it after the meeting.

Seriously, try it, you have to try it to realise how powerful this is.