How to lead productive project meetings

A Project Meeting is a regular event that involves stakeholders and key functions to generate group decisions  and take actions that contribute to quicker project delivery, according to the planned goals and expected results. Normally, it will be a series of meeting sections and sustain for a period,  instead of one-time meeting.

There are three key stages in project meeting: a) Kick-off meeting; b) Follow-up meeting; c) Announcement of final outcome. Personally, I think kick-off meeting is the most important stage which is the first meeting of the project where you give all the team members good news that project is ‘go ahead’ from the sponsors and also set the tone of your project – is it going to be a success or a failure.

Kick-off meeting

Primary kick-off meeting should make preparation similarly with normal meeting including a) setting goal; b) project team member and responsibility; c) project assumption; d) initial project plan; e) key milestones; f) meeting schedule; g) meeting material(deck). The meeting leaders need to achieve below goals during kick-off meeting:

·         Energize project team

·         Communicate goals and expectations

·         Introduce team members and stake-holders

·         Highlight importance of project for organization

·         Provide information of processes, communication plan, project plan, key milestones

·         Handout team members’ contact information including their function name

·         Present regular meeting schedule

·         Give time to attendees to ask questions and express views

 

Follow-up meeting

Project will persist for a period and need to schedule regular follow-up meeting to trace the whole progress of project including the status of plan,  outcome and key milestones by stage, feedback and challenge. During follow-up meeting, leaders should focus on those due pending action items, investigate the key issues, work out the solution with specific small group, and decide escalation items. At the same time, meeting leaders also need to reschedule separate meeting within small groups for specific goal and avoid wasting whole project team's time. At the end of follow-up meeting, meeting leader should summarize all outcomes, pending items, related action owners with deadline, and next meeting time.

Announcement of final outcome  

Once the project launches successfully, meeting leader will hold a final meeting named " Announcement of xxx Project". In this last meeting, meeting leader will announce the result of project and express appreciation on behalf of company. Furthermore, high level managers will be invited to present medals for those key contributors. But if the project fails to launch due to some reasons, project leaders also need to hold this meeting to announce the result, express personal appreciation for all team members, and brief the cause of failure.