The definition meeting is designed to be long, messy, and expensive. For projects with fewer than a dozen team members, a definition meeting generally takes four hours (with appropriate breaks). Larger project teams should budget a full workday. The length is intentional—it is designed to slow down and focus the team away from the problems they know they know and onto discovering problems in their blind spot. In fact, don’t be discouraged if your first definition meeting does not get through the entire project statement. The most useful measure of success for these meetings is the list of
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