LTV at LTC: First, Meetings

Of course once we got approval we didn't start building the system. We started having meetings about building the system.

The first set of planned meetings didn't actually happen, which was a very good thing. Our manager wanted us hold bi-weekly meetings with managers from across the marketing organization. These meetings would have been a disaster.

We didn't know enough about LTV in general and customer behavior at LTC in specific to be able to lead these meetings. We would have had a group of senior managers taking about a project that got at the heart of how LTC did business with no real agenda for these meetings. As I found out in the course of the project, LTC was an information-starved company and very few people had a good idea of the real internal financials of the company. The most likely result of these planned meetings would have been tangential suggestions and demands that would have misdirected the project.

One of the lessons we learned from this project was how important it is to manage the meetings around a project: early meetings should be held with those necessary to get the project done but large meetings with the simply interested should be avoided until the leaders can bring a lot of understanding and direction to the meetings.