Effectively planning a project meeting is the first step to having an effective project
meeting. In the last post, I outlined some general reasons why your meetings
may not be working and how to improve your meetings. Before you even schedule a
meeting, you should be able to complete the following sentence:
“My meeting will be successful if…”
If you can’t complete that sentence, keep your mouse clicks away from that Outlook
calendar! You should never default to scheduling a meeting just because you
think that is what you should do. Meetings should be limited to meetings with
clear goals and clear action items. For project meetings, the goal should be to
include all project team members in order to use their skill sets to
effectively complete a project on time and on budget.
The reason most project meetings are not successful in their goal, is because they
are not planned well, they tend to get off topic, and the meeting does not have
any clear action items. So, with effective planning, you will enjoy the
following benefits:
When you start a project, you should follow these steps and use the appropriate
visual for each step:
The initial brainstorming of your project's goals and steps is crucial for your project to succeed. The best tool for brainstorming is a mind map. For the purpose of this post, the project deliverables are new
help materials for a product.
Building an Attendee List for Your Meeting
After you have your entire project scoped out using a mind map, you should be able to
identify who is needed to successfully complete a project. Keep in mind whose
skills are essential for successfully completing a project. The team chart will
help all those involved in the project understand what their responsibilities
will be for their contribution to a successful project. For our project with
the goal of producing new help files, our team chart might look something like
this:
In order to have a productive conversation, you should be sure to limit the
meeting to those who you know will be able to contribute to the project’s
completion. If you can’t even find a meeting room that will fit everyone, you
probably have too many people on the attendee list.
Outlining an Agenda for Your Meeting
Once you have an idea of the scope of your project and those who are involved, you
can set up your project kick-off meeting agenda using a mind map. This mind map
will keep your meeting on task for reaching your goals. Your mind map should
identify the main goals, the project parts, and the action items required to
reach the goals and complete project parts. When I plan a project kick-off
meeting, I start off with a mind map that looks something like this:
Use your full mind map with all the project goals, parts, and action items to
create a smaller mind map for your first meeting. Following this template, the
mind map for our project kick-off meeting would look something like this:
For each of the project parts, you can outline what is needed to successfully
complete that project part. If you download the file I made, you will find how
I added the action items for each project part. During the meeting, this mind
map can be edited and the action items can be defined. Before the meeting, you can send the team chart and the whole mind map, or the goals portion of the mind map to all of the invitees of the meeting. This will allow those who attend to
understand what will be discussed at the meeting and how their participation fits into the entirety of the project.
In my next post, I will go into more detail about how you will then execute your
visual meeting using the mind map you created. You can download the SmartDraw
files I created for this post by using the links below, but you will need a
copy of SmartDraw on your desktop. If you do not own SmartDraw, click here for
a free trial.
[Example] Help Materials Team Chart.sdr
[Example] Project Kick-off Meeting Mind Map.sdr
[Example] Help Materials Project Kick-off Meeting Mind Map.sdr
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