Successful Project Management

Building 310

Meeting Strategies

A meeting can be defined in many ways, one of which is: “a focused interaction of cognitive attention, planned or chance, where people agree to come together for a common purpose, whether at the same time and the same place, or at different times in different places” . Or as Kayser defines: “A meeting is a gathering where people speak up, say nothing, and then all disagree” . The last definition indicates how unproductive and unconstructive meetings can be. In fact, research shows that even though managers spend more than 50% of his/her official work time in meetings, many meetings fail and cause great and unnecessary costs on wasted working time.

However, meetings can be very essential for larger groups of people working together, in order to agree upon key project management activities such as scheduling, cost, and quality. For this reason good meeting strategies can be helpful and in some cases necessary. There are many tools which can be applied in order to make meetings more efficient, and in this article some of the most common ones are explained.

Making meetings time efficient
Meetings will run throughout the whole project, but according to when the meeting is held there are different things to take into account. The project manager is responsible for facilitating the meetings and for identifying which challenges will be, or can be, met in different phases in order to achieve the overall goal of the project. One useful method is to make a model of the project phases and to identify possible challenges in each phase. One example of such a model can be seen in Figure xx.

Insert a figure of the project phases

The project phase model is unique for every project, but usually the project goes through four phases: (1) Initiation (2) Planning (3) Execution (4) Closing. Each phase has different associated management activities .

Another tool which can be used together with the project phase model is to identify the costs throughout the whole project’s life cycle. In most projects the costs will be low in the beginning (Initiation) and will start to increase from the end of the planning phase . It is important to make the meetings as efficient as possible when the costs are high, which such a model can help you identify. An example of the model is illustrated in Figure xx.

Insert model of cost and staffing level model.

A collection of tools for meeting strategies
Avoid unnecessary meetings
First of all it is important to avoid unnecessary meetings. This is especially important when the costs are high and the time is scarce, since people are not fond of wasting their time and this will cause higher costs. A good method is therefore to set up some guidelines for when it is acceptable to call a meeting in order to avoid unnecessary meetings. There are a couple of things that indicates when a meeting is needed ]]

Customer Profile

• Gains: the benefits which the customer expects and needs, what would delight customers and the things which may increase likelihood of adopting a value proposition.
• Pains: the negative experiences, emotions and risks that the customer experiences in the process of getting the job done.
• Customer jobs: the functional, social and emotional tasks customers are trying to perform, problems they are trying to solve and needs they wish to satisfy.

Value Proposition

• Gain creators: how the product or service creates customer gains and how it offers added value to the customer.
• Pain relievers: a description of exactly how the product or service alleviates customer pains.
• Products and services: the products and services which create gain and relieve pain, and which underpin the creation of value for the customer.

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