How much does a meeting cost?

I've been working for the last few months for a huge company who shall be nameless.



Managers in this company like to call team meetings so that the team can bring the manager up-to-speed on what's going on and how progress is. The typical team meeting will go on for an hour and a half and there will be between nine and twelve people sat around the conference table basically reiterating stuff that could have been said in e-mail in under five minutes.



The main problem is that the managers themselves are non-technical and have more responsibility for administrative tasks than for getting the product out the door. This company prices all its work in man-days and a manager who called todays meeting was recently heard to say that the team had spent 150 man-days this year on project X and "nothing had been done"



Well, apart from the fact that the whole team has moved from C++ to C#, had courses in Windows Forms, changed the development practices from "useless hierarchical" to XP / Scrum and defined a .net application architecture, each person on the team spends more than four hours a week in meetings.



Half a day per person per week means 8 lost man-days per week. On a six month project, this means 200 man-days lost out of a budget of 2000. This also means paying a developer to sit and do nothing but scribble on a jotter for two-thirds of a year.