Long term projects need meetings to check progress, address issues, and keep stakeholders engaged. Here’s a couple of tips to make sure your regularly scheduled meetings have some teeth:
Provide an agenda: Meetings eat up time and if you know the agenda in advance you will have an idea of how much. If you want to add an item to the agenda then respond to the organizer (and cc: all) to make that request. If everyone practices this, then you can keep meeting time focused.
Define the Action Items: Updates are fine, but the real takaway from a meeting is action. An Action Item needs three things to be effective. An Owner, a Deliverable, and a Deadline. Meeting agendas should include an update on open action items.
Send a Recap: The agenda is the template for what was discussed: what was learned, what was debated, what was agreed upon, what was decided, and were there any actionable items. By keeping a brief summary of the meeting, attendees can get up to speed if they miss one. Minutes would also remind folks of new Action Items and connect them to the agenda.
Interim Review: Sometimes it is necessary to do a recap – explain the current project scope, demonstrate what progress has been made, and discuss whether the progress is appropriate and deadlines reasonable. Schedule these at meeting junctures that would otherwise have short agendas. This may be when progress has been inhibited by resource setbacks or after a a scope change.
2 Comments to 'Quick Tips on Making Project Meetings Work Better'
April 28, 2009
Good tips on substance, but there are also general meeting strategies that can be extremely helpful when having regularly scheduled meetings. One of my favorites is to eliminate the late factor. Anyone running a meeting should not tolerate people coming in late – don’t back-up or re-hash everything that has been reviewed before the ‘latecomer’ arrived. Starting a meeting late is a big waste of all the attendees’ time and the 5 minute re-cap just adds to it. If you can’t get people to come on time with this technique, try locking the meeting room door and forcing people to knock to get in. I have used this in extreme cases and people eventually managed to get to the meetings on time!
April 30, 2009
I agree that meeting start times are a big contention point. I think your suggestion to lock the door would work well in some environments. My more generic solution is the 10% rule (and work towards the 5% level). You can wait to begin the meeting up to 10% into the scheduled meeting time. For a ten minute stand-up meeting that would be one minute. For an hour long meeting, up to six minutes. The moderator or meeting owner can then reasonably begin – if not before. Late comers will know – as will the room – that they are late. As an attendee I do not like it when we recap the meeting to bring the latecomer up to date. There are times when that may be necessary, but I would apologize to the rest of the team for putting them through that.
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