Interface management and meeting culture: less friction, fewer meetings

Interface management is the conscious design of the handovers between people, departments, sites or systems. It clarifies who delivers what, in what quality, by when and to whom, how feedback works and what happens in the event of deviations. The tools are process mapping with a swimlane diagram, handover agreements and service level agreements between departments. The aim is for work to flow from one point to the next without queries, waiting times and duplicated work. Most process losses arise at interfaces, which is why managing them is one of the most effective levers in process optimisation.

Not with team building, but with clarity. Map the shared process together with both departments, mark every handover and ask at each point what the receiving side needs in order to continue working immediately. Agree this in writing, with a measurable quantity such as completeness or response time, and set up a short regular meeting in which both sides discuss deviations. Most conflicts between departments are not personal conflicts but unclarified expectations. Once the expectation has been agreed, the frustration usually disappears by itself.

A clear purpose that is known in advance: to inform, to decide or to solve a problem. Only the participants who are needed for it. An agenda with a timebox per item, a facilitator who keeps to the time, and decision minutes with decisions, owners and deadlines, not with the course of the conversation. Meetings that take place regularly also need a fixed structure that does not change every time. And the question at the end: could this meeting have been shorter or dropped altogether? Anyone who answers it honestly halves their meeting time.

Start and finish on time, even if not everyone is there, and an agenda by the day before at the latest, otherwise the meeting does not take place. Every item has an owner and a timebox, laptops stay closed except for the person taking the minutes, and decisions are made in the room and recorded immediately. Anyone who is not needed may leave, and anything under 15 minutes is done standing up. Once a quarter comes the inventory: which regular meetings have produced a decision in the last three months? The others are cut or merged.

With an inventory: list all the regular meetings of a department, with purpose, participants, duration, frequency and last outcome, and multiply participants by duration by frequency; that is the price in hours. Then check each meeting to see whether decisions are made here or only reports given; reports can be handled in writing or at the board. Meetings with overlapping purposes are merged, and what remains gets rules and a cascade so that topics land at the right level. Using this approach, I reduced meeting time in one operations division by over 20 %.

An internal SLA is an agreement between two departments that makes a handover binding: what is delivered, in what quality, in what time, and how is it measured? For example: production planning receives complete order data from sales according to a checklist; incomplete orders go back within four hours; production planning delivers the production order within two working days. The SLA replaces expectations with agreements and provides a key figure that both sides can discuss objectively, instead of blaming each other.

As a cascade with fixed times. In the morning the stand-up meeting at the line board with the shift leader and team, ten minutes: what did not work yesterday, what are we doing today? Then the department meeting with foremen and production management, where only the topics the line cannot solve itself arrive. Then the plant round with plant management, again only with the escalated topics. Each level decides what it can decide and passes the rest upwards. This cascade replaces a large part of the classic meetings, because problems are solved where they arise.

There is no fixed number, but there is a rule of thumb: anyone who spends more than half of their working time in meetings is no longer leading, but reporting. For a production manager, the daily regular meetings of the cascade together should stay under one hour, plus a weekly department meeting and a monthly review. Anything beyond that should have a specific reason. More important than the number is the question of whether, after every meeting, it is clear who does what by when. If that is not the case, it was too much, regardless of the duration.