Meetings are a critical part of us getting our job done and without them we would be spending our time fretting over Gantt charts and spreadsheets wondering whether everything was really going to plan.
Not everyone shares your enthusiasm. The more time people spend in meetings the less time they feel they have to do their ‘real” work. And the less effective meetings are the more frustrated participants can get.
As a regular reader of Better Projects you already know a few important things about meeting management. You always have an agenda, and clear objectives. You always try to give people plenty of notice about meetings, and you always follow up with minutes, or emails confirming key points and actions.Today I wanted to cover off a technique to help you keep meeting content on track and focused where it should be. It’s best applied in workshops rather than smaller meetings, but can be scaled to the situation. It's another application of the urgency/important matrix.
Efficiency is often considered important, right? When you are a project professional one of the main ways this impacts you is in the number, duration and quality of meetings. This framework can help you speed up your meetings and keep them foused on the highest impact issues.
Take in a printed matrix and some sticky notes, or draw up this diagram onto a whiteboard and as things come up that are off agenda, or agenda items drag on for longer that appropriate, stop and spend a minute assessing where on this grid the issue belongs. Get consensus from the room on its appropriate place and move on.
Important issues can be addressed later in the meeting, and other items can be dealt with as appropriate afterwards.
Try it out and let me know what you think.
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ReplyDeleteI love meetings indeed, I know they must be productive, but part of me feels that a meeting is also a good way to take a little rest from the "real work".
ReplyDeleteI admit that sometimes the meetings I schedule are not that important nor productive, they are performed to give everybody a chance to get out of the office, see different people and interact face to face, enhancing the bonds.
Maybe it´s something about the Latin culture that makes us depend so much on face to face interactions and high complicity (everything here is personal).
If there´s a good output from that, would still be a sin?
Kerber
ReplyDeleteYou raise a good point. Sometimes you just need to bring the team/stakeholders together.
Projects shouldn't always be running a million miles an hour and super lean. In fact that's probably a sign you are out of control or are soon going to be.
Anyone from Nth America or Asia got a view on this?
Keep in ming the difference between efficiency and effectivness.
ReplyDelete