Project Meetings – Make it count

Project Meetings - Make it count

Meetings are often viewed as time wasters—unfortunately, with good reason. This blog will explain how you can make it worthwhile. Especially for a Project Manager.

Everyone will find themselves preparing and holding some kind of meeting from time to time, right? Who hasn’t been in charge of a meeting before? And for project managers, this can happen many times a week. We should, without a doubt, have formal weekly meetings with the project client. We can also hold internal team meetings on a weekly basis.

These meetings are typically our best ways to get and provide reliable and timely project status reports, since accurate project information is important. We do, however, want them to be worthwhile. And by worthwhile, I mean reliable, timely, effective, profitable, and so on.

It doesn't just happen…rather, you have to enforce it by following key steps:

Invite who is actually needed

Just like project requirements , you can categorize your meeting invites to “MUST HAVE, SHOULD HAVE , GOOD TO HAVE & WON’T have attendees.

Just invite those who are needed (MUSTs & SHOULDs). If you try to include everybody – including those who may simply receive follow-up notes via email but aren’t required for decision-making or discussion – you risk earning a reputation as a time waster. And don’t think about those who may be insulted by not being invited to your little gathering. It’s not necessary to allow the petty emotion.

The above diagram, which you may have prepared for stakeholder management, may come in handy; I often use it. This clearly shows who can attend the meeting and who can get away with an email or a note.

Manage Closely : There are some people who would not want to miss any meeting, so make sure they are up to date with all the details. They are your most trusted ally, decision-makers, and key contributors to the project’s success.
Keep Satisfied : You should meet with these stakeholders at least bi-weekly to provide updates and solicit input. Make sure you’ve closed the loop with these stakeholders.
Keep Informed and Monitor : These stakeholders can be part of email communication, they need not to be in decision making meetings

Focused agenda

If you meet regularly and the meeting lasts longer than 30 minutes, it’s time to evaluate whether your agenda is effective enough or not.

Agenda helps you to stay on track. In reality, you should try to limit meetings to one hour or less wherever possible. If it needs to be longer, it should probably be split into several meetings because you’ll almost certainly be covering more than one significant (but understandably related) topic.

What you do after meeting, matters

It’s likely that this is the most important part, but it’s also the one that gets the least publicity. For the most part, if a meeting is over, it’s over. But, really, that’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of ensuring that everyone understands what happened after the meeting.

It is your responsibility as the PM to ensure that this occurs. Send out your project meeting notes and actionable with names and due date as soon as possible, and ask for a reasonable response time from your main stakeholders on any updates or additions.

Conclusion

Meetings, like cars, are unavoidable evils. Unless you collect them, You only need cars if you want to get from point “A” to point “B,” .They are also expensive in terms of both money and time. The same can be said for meetings. However, you need their involvement as well as the knowledge that they can provide.

As a result, schedule, organize, and execute. Make them useful, reliable, and effective. Since the last thing you want is to hold another meeting to cover one that wasn’t fruitful, you want a high attendance and participation rate.

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Manwendra Singh.

Manwendra is known for his ability to produce outstanding deliverables that help businesses grow. A Thought leader in the field of project management and operations management, he is known for his ability to challenge the status quo, introduce new perspectives, and redefine the box rather than only thinking outside of it.