CST 499 - Week 1

Running Effective Project Meetings

*Summarizing the article "How to Run Effective Business Meetings That Produce Results*

Running an effective project meeting also requires work to be done before and after the meeting itself. To prepare for an upcoming meeting, the article suggests to do the following: 

Plan The Meeting - Who will participate in the meeting, When and Where will the meeting be held, What will be accomplished in this meeting? Once you have decided these things, does this meeting need to happen? Can these goals be accomplished without a formal meeting?

Confirm Participation - Is everyone that is necessary to attend the meeting able to attend?

Distribute and Review Pre-work - Distribute any crucial meeting items or information to everyone involved. Ask meeting members to look over any pre-meeting notes to confirm if anything needs to be added or prepared ahead of the meeting. This is when documentation like reports or presentations would be planned and prepared.

Now that the necessary preparations have been made, these are the steps that should be taken during the meeting:

Facilitation - A meeting leader should be established to help direct the meeting. This helps ensure all meeting agendas will be addressed and the group stays on topic.

Participation - Everyone that was invited to the meeting should have some participation. To help with this, assign each member a "Do-Able" action.

Plan to Follow-Up - Before the meeting has ended, everyone should be clear on what comes next. A follow-up plan should be made with the new information gained in the meeting. A plan should include: specific action items and assigned roles for completion of those items, when the actions should be completed by, and a consensus on how to decide when those items are successfully "completed".

After the meeting, it is everyone's responsibility to follow up on the items addressed in the meeting:

Meeting Minutes - Provide the dictated agenda of what occurred in the meeting for everyone to be able to review while they are working on the follow-up action items.

Track Follow-up items - Progress made on the follow-up items should be tracked somewhere that everyone involved in the meeting has access to. Once tasks are completed, this should be communicated to any relevant meeting members.

Accountability - Meeting members should feel accountable for the items they are assigned. Progress in the next meeting is not stalled by left over or delayed items from the last meeting.

Debriefing - regular debriefing and reviews of the meeting process should be done to improve on your teams productivity and collaboration strategy.

Context is Key

While my role is not directly related to implementing any software, I work as a junior test engineer for a product development team. There is a daily standup meeting that all members attend to provide their updates for the day. Meeting agendas are typically not made ahead of time and sent out, but rather made from the previous day's meetings. This helps everyone get a sense of where each sub-project is at, regardless of if they are able to work directly with that team member. I may not have any idea what the mechanical engineer on my team is talking about during their time, but it helps to have the context of what they are working on in the case where I might need to design a test case for a project they are working on. Having the context of what other members of my team are doing on any given day, helps keep productivity focused on the final product rather than just my role.