Evaluating Aircraft Maintenance Production Meeting Effectiveness

Meetings fulfill many important functions within an organization, while also representing a significant cost. This is particularly true in United States Air Force (USAF) Maintenance Groups, where preparing for and attending aircraft maintenance production meetings represent a significant portion of key maintenance leaders duty day. Due to their prevalence and cost, research into meetings, and specifically how to design them to be as effective as possible, has become an important field of study, termed "meeting science". The design characteristics identified in "meeting science" research have been employed at organizations across the private sector to improve their meeting culture and increase effectiveness. While meetings and meeting design characteristics have been widely studied and applied in the private sector, little to no research or application has been done in the USAF maintenance community. This paper will evaluate the daily aircraft maintenance production meetings held at the Maintenance Group level to assess whether it is an effective use of time that produces value added outcomes commensurate to its costs to the organization or, if not, how it can be changed to do so through an application of science-based meeting design principles.