Before you send a meeting or workshop pre-read to participants, consider a formal meeting announcement rather than an informal calendar invite. If accepted, follow up the announcement with the invite, and then your pre-read package.

Meeting Announcement

While all of the following is not necessary, put yourself in the position of the participant. Therefore, ask yourself, “Would I be interested in knowing this _______?” Clearly, if the answer is ‘yes’, then consider putting it in your meeting announcement.

Therefore, some considerations include:

• Meeting facilitator contact information; including perhaps:
  • Easy to cut and paste email
  • URL for business group or division
  • Primary telephone
  • Mobile telephone
  • URL for SharePoint or workgroup folder
• Meeting logistics; including perhaps:
  • Date of meeting
  • Time of meeting
  • Duration of meeting
  • Location of meeting (including a map if part of a large campus setting). Plus any hints about best access such as elevator banks to take or avoid
• Meeting participants; including perhaps:
  • List of attendees
  • Alternatively, consider adding their contact information as well
  • Items that should or should NOT be brought with them
  • Request for questions they would like answered during the meeting
• Meeting rationale; including:
  • Purpose and scope of the meeting (50 words or less)
  • Statement of meeting deliverables (i.e., output) or desired outcome
  • DRAFT agenda items (knowing some minor changes may occur)
  • Other miscellanies particular to your situation

While these considerations may appear burdensome, they are truly optimal. You can remove or subtract as you deem fit, but always make adjustments from the point of view of the participants, rather than what will make your life easier.

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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Facilitation Expert

Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.