Description
One of six basic project management skills is to hold productive team meetings at the right frequency and duration. Project management includes soft skills, the most important is motivating and forming a team who can accomplish a great deal of work in a relatively short time span. This naturally happens in team meetings if handled consistently.
Why? If the team is not working together the project will take much longer than it should, wasting time and overall slowing the process. If a project is Red - the team should be meeting daily and the project manager communicating to the sponsor on progress to recover.
The project manager determines the team meeting frequency. Things to be considered include urgency of project, type of project like Agile vs Waterfall, volume of work to be done, availability of team members including the PM, phase of the project. For example: early on perhaps 2-3 times a week the team should meet as it is needed to define and assign work. Build phase may need only a 15-minute meeting once every two weeks as everyone is heads down in their work tasks. Team meetings are deleted as needed for example during Deploy, if the users are testing for two weeks and there are no issues to discuss the meeting can be canceled. It is strongly encouraged to have a standing time and place for the team to meet. This helps people plan and more fully participate. Keeping the same pattern for status meeting contributes to team members' accountability and visibility of project's progress.
Resolution
How to get started? The first meeting is a kick off meeting. All team members, Project Manager, Sponsor, key stakeholders, owner, etc. gather for a longer meeting to understand objectives, goals, success criteria, deliverable, timeline, etc. These cross-departmental meetings are structured. Key deliverables out of this meeting are a confirmed scope, business drivers, key deliverable, defined success criteria, communication channels and next touch point with sponsor.
After the kick off meeting, the smaller or core team starts meeting to start laying out the work. Let the team member define and estimate their work. Use a card wall or just yellow sticky notes, laying them out afterwards in the needed order. Encourage a verb noun for all task, identify who will do it, and their estimated hours to complete. Example: Write two knowledge base articles, Anita, 3 hours. Always use whatever efficient and effective method the team needs to keep progressing. The PMO is available for help on your meetings.
There are three agenda items to cover in every status meeting with the team:
a) The Schedule (Plan) should be opened and review progress. If a task is behind, obtain a new due date from the team member. If tasks and milestones are late, the project will be late.
b) The open Issue list, update and assign as needed. Address Med/High or High project issues before scheduled tasks. Assign someone immediately and ask for a planned completion date.
c) Risk Matrix - simply ask if any of the risks have been realized and implement the planned strategy immediately to prevent delays, assigning people to go to work on it as appropriate. Ask if there are new risks that anyone has thought of and document them.
Tips:
If there becomes a discussion in detail on an issue or how to do a task, remind the team this is a status meeting and that you can set up a working meeting to discuss the topic to resolution. Project deliverables and decisions come out of working meetings, update status and assignments come out of the status meeting.
Keep the Status meeting short as possible. Some team members that have worked well together previously, may have a pull system. The team members just pick the next card or task and continue the work, conferring with others as needed. Newer or larger teams may need more structure and assign tasks in the meeting, pushing tasks to keep the work flowing. If a project is behind, the project manager may have to re-assign/re-arrange the tasks to ensure they get completed on time.
Never hesitate to include extended team members, users, sponsor or stake holders when needed, especially during transiting phases like preparing to Build - gain the users input on the design or Deploy meetings, when can the testing, training and go live dates be scheduled.
If a tough topic needs discussed - set up a meeting one on one with the person who can make the needed changes, always keep the spirit of the team meetings as one another helping others.
The last meeting should be a Lessons Learned meeting. See notes on the Lesson Learned template in every project's briefcase.
Always keep team meetings positive and thank the team members for their contributions.