« The Two Types of Quality Reviews
Software Projects and Release Dates »

Visualizing Your Project Meetings

February 20, 2010 | Author: PM Hut | Filed under: Communications Management, Project Management Best Practices

Visualizing Your Project Meetings
By Olesya Gileva

According to research, most project specialists take part in 62 meetings a month and approximately half of this time is considered to be non-productive. If we deem that each meeting lasts for one hour, then most project specialists lose 31 hours every month in unproductive meetings, nearly 4 full working days a month. When looking at these statistics, it is not surprising that meetings have such a bad reputation.

Have you ever met such the following situation: Meeting participants plunge into numbness, lose focus and are completely switched off from work. Often the structure of a meeting can kill its content.

What is the recipe of a successful meeting?

A meeting should be held with goodwill and trust for all participants. Also the meeting should be conducted for only as long as it reasonable, too long of a meeting time spoils the results. It is critical that all participants trust each other, so they can exchange all of their opinions and ideas without fear of being criticized.

The primary objective is to make the meeting as visual as possible. Using visual documentation during the main stages of a meeting will engage and focus the meeting participants.

  1. Preparing to meet

    Each participant should receive notification by email of the meeting particulars. From this notification, everyone will also learn what they should prepare for the meeting. It is important to make it short and clear from the first start. The best tool for such purposes is a mind map.

  2. Holding the meeting

    It is very important to conduct a meeting’s flow in the right order. Visual documentation is also very helpful during this stage. Using similar terminology for like documents reduces time on their discussion. The best tool for such purposes is also a mind map. Many times it is the same mind map, that was created while preparing for the meeting. It is easy to edit the map by making notes, or add topics during the meeting; all participants
    can see the edits on a screen or on a white board. Working in a team, it is then possible to obtain an atmosphere of understanding, and be assured that the documents will be understood correctly by all participants.

  3. Meeting results

    The decisions made in the meeting should be accurately documented. It is impossible to have effective meeting results if no documentation exists at the conclusion of the meeting. A mind map can be used to identify decisions made on each item of meeting’s agenda. As a rule when the meeting comes to a conclusion it is good to already have the summary document prepared. The summary document can be used to generate ToDo mind maps for meeting participants or it can be used as a checklist for further work. Very often people make notes during the meeting. It is useful to include them into a summary. Furthermore, such notes can be written by the entire team. These notes from the participants add value because of the additional information and value in the summary document.

What is useful for visual meetings?

  • Using a set of visual elements familiar to all participants. Making your documents easier to understand at a glance.
  • Using predetermined questions in your mind map to set direction of discussion during the meeting.
  • Leaving blank space for comments and questions.
  • Use of devices that can make the meeting more interactive, for example a screen or white board.

What to avoid during visual meetings?

  • Using different visual elements for the same type of documents.
  • Sending a huge set of materials just before start of meeting.
  • Using a lot of information in a table format.
  • Using multi-page documents.

Summary

The necessity of having meetings is obvious. The point is to find methods and techniques which are capable of improving meetings. It is critical to a project’s success to find methods that can help a manager make meetings shorter, and make meetings more informative, exciting and effective for all participants.

Olesya Gileva is a Product Manager of the ConceptDraw project at CS Odessa.

Computer Systems Odessa is a leading software development company that builds critical business tools for the desktop. CS Odessa is the maker of Concept Draw, a set of highly functional cross-platform productivity tools.

Share this article:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google
  • blogmarks
  • LinkedIn
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • TwitThis
  • Yahoo! Buzz

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 and is filed under Communications Management, Project Management Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 people have left comments

Interesting article Olesya, some very good points around meetings. In my experience, the features of good meetings are, a published agenda for everyone beforehand, only invite those who need to be there, a strong leader for the meeting who will keep the discussion on topic and engage everyone in discussions, not just the usual few who love to talk, keep the meeting on schedule and publish the minutes promptly after the meeting. Also, meetings can have “expiry dates”, it is good to review the ROI of meetings periodically to ensure they are still required.

Francis Norman wrote on February 21, 2010 - 2:35 am | Visit Link

Hi Olesya,

Thanks for the excellent points regarding meetings. I would like to add two things.

One is to track all open TODOs of past meetings to completion. This can be done in every instance of recurring meetings. For completed tasks, the TODOs can me marked as closed. For incomplete tasks, it should be kept OPEN and a new expected closure date should be set, so that it is tracked in a later instance of the meeting.

Second is to use a software tool to write the ‘Minutes of Meeting’ *during* the meeting, so that the captured minutes are comprehensive, accurate and short ! They should be circulated right after the meeting.

You may want to evalute a free and open source tool for the same, called YaMA. Checkout http://yama.sourceforge.net.

Regards,
– Atul

Atul wrote on February 22, 2010 - 5:29 am | Visit Link

feel free to leave a comment

Comment Guidelines: Basic XHTML is allowed (a href, strong, em, code). All line breaks and paragraphs are automatically generated. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Email addresses will never be published. Keep it PG-13 people!

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

All fields marked with " * " are required.

Project Management Categories