When I ask my project management students to develop their first work breakdown structure, there are inevitably a few meetings listed as deliverables.
I feel strongly that a meeting itself should never be considered a deliverable. Meetings are held in order to achieve an objective. Therefore, we can list the desired outcome of the meeting as a deliverable, but not the meeting itself.
This is part of a larger problem, which is that meetings take on a life of their own. The worst offender is the “weekly status meeting,” held in dysfunctional organizations around the world. Team members come together having received no agenda and then a rambling discourse follows while they talk about what they’ve done in the recent past. With no direction and no documented goal, the meeting becomes an almost complete waste of time. It’s OK to have a regularly scheduled meeting time, but someone must own that meeting and give it a publicized purpose.
Some resources to help you to plan and hold great meetings can be found on my Amazon store page.