Dimitri and I do a fair amount of travelling, visiting customer sites and working on projects. The companies we visit range in size from small biotech companies with 50 employees to large sites with 300 or more. These companies are all at different points in a project management maturity journey. At some point though, every company realises that they can’t afford 3 hour meetings where no decisions were made, no action items were assigned, and half the attendees couldn’t find the email with the attached pre-reading document.
At this point, organizations usually begin to impose some rules:
- Communicate the objectives of the meeting
- No meetings without agendas
- Limit the attendees to the minimum number required to make a decision
- No status update meetings (use email)
- Do meeting prep outside the meeting — no surprises
- Document the meeting, attendees, action items, decisions to the rest of the team
- Follow-up at the next meeting, or earlier if necessary
Most of these best practices are familiar to Project Managers through the PMIs guidelines for effective meetings. But it requires a high-level of discipline, and if you have days where your diary is filled with meetings, then finding the time to achieve this level of discipline can be challenging.
Make It Easier To Do The Right Thing
To make it easier, we added Project Meeting support to Pipeline. We listened to customers and realised that they use a variety of tools to set-up meetings, handle invitations, allocate meeting rooms, and setup teleconference bridge details and so forth. So our first goal was not to re-invent those tools, attempt to obsolete them, or integrate with them all. But rather to provide a single place where all the artifacts of the meeting could reside.
If you use Outlook to manage your meetings, then when you create the meeting, you simply add a link to your project’s meeting page in your Outlook calendar entry — just as you might add a Google Hangout link, or a Webex link.
Add agenda items for your meeting. Each item has a Note field associated with it that lets you capture notes for a specific agenda item.
Add the attendees for the meeting. Each attendee has an associated profile that you can use to help better understand the attendees. This means that even if you’re meeting virtually with colleagues that you’ve never interacted with before in person, you’ll feel better prepared, and have icebreaker topics for a conversation.
In the meeting description, let people know the purpose of the meeting. If there are decisions to be made, add them to the Decisions section of the meeting.
Add all of the documents that you want people to review. You can either add a link from your document management system, or if you don’t have one, use PIpeline’s built-in cloud file system. It uses a secure Google Drive that’s only accessible by your company. Check the “Pre-Reading” tick box to let the attendees know that they need to prepare for the meeting by doing the pre-reading.
During the meeting, work your way through the agenda items. Use the Notes feature to capture information on the agenda item. If, during the course of the meeting, you diverge from the agenda, add a Discussion Item and capture the information.
Identify action items during the meeting and assign them as you go. They’ll show up immediately in the project tasks page, and in the task list of the person to whom they’re assigned. If you identify any risks or issues during the meeting, you can quickly capture them. They’re automatically added to your project so you can follow up on them later.
Remember, meetings are a team effort, and this means everyone on the team can capture and share meeting information in real-time using Pipeline’s real-time database. Everyone on the team is engaged in the meeting process, the onus doesn’t just fall on one person to take notes, and manage action items.
And since Pipeline is a mobile-first web application it means that you don’t have to have your laptop with you to participate in the meeting. You can easily add Pipeline to your phone or tablet, by browsing to the site and tapping “Add To Home Screen”.
Moreover, the tangible benefits to the team are shorter, more focused meetings where team members have everything they need to prepare for a meeting. No more being blindsided by meeting prep information buried in an email. Everything that you need for the meeting is in one place and attached to your meeting notification.
Read more of the Pipeline Stories series.
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