Here is how to develop the basis for a successful meeting framework in four easy steps.
To prepare your meeting framework write down the program purpose, project scope, meeting deliverables, and likely participants.
Develop the Basis for a Successful Meeting Framework in Four Easy Steps
Method
Finish the following:
- Write down your deliverable and strive to Get Examples! Outputs from the meeting represent the needed documentation and crucial information. What are we producing? Next, show participants examples from the past or from other projects if available. Align the output with the group’s strategic plan to help reconcile any trade-offs that may need to be made in the meeting.
- Measure the impact of the meeting on the program and write down the project scope. Identify the level of detail desired, the type of session (planning, problem-solving, design, etc.), and what must be DONE during the meeting. Furthermore, clarify what might be excluded (due to scope) or what the meeting purpose and meeting scope are NOT.
- Draft and compose the agenda steps that enable you to sequence the information that is needed. Identify the missing information that you need to produce the deliverables. Rely on your group’s meeting design or life cycle. The best sources and sequence for your draft agenda include the following:
- In-house life cycle (e.g., SAFe)
- Team charter, prior work, or MGRUSH agendas to plan, analyze, solve, or design.
- Experience—look at past meetings (or CoP; i.e., a community of practice), and ask, “What questions need to be answered to satisfy the purpose of the meeting?” Look at the questions built during the interviews.
- Talk to the project manager, other partners (i.e., the product owner), or other group experts.
- Go to a library or bookstore but do NOT rely on Google® alone for intellectual property.
THE THREE STEPS ABOVE YIELD A STRAW MODEL OR SIMPLE MEETING FRAMEWORK
For Lean or Agile also consider
– Existing enterprise systems or processes (life cycle)
– Architecture infrastructure (consider drafting a baseline architectural pattern)
– Scoping/ phasing (what high-level information is known)
– Consider existing process models, high-level ERD, and actors’ security/ policy
- Identify the most appropriate participants. Identify what knowledge or expertise each needs to bring to the workshop. Determine how much of the agenda the participants understand and can reasonably complete in a group environment. Identify what issues they have—do they need team-building or creativity or some management of behavior? Find someone who will provide resistance at the meeting so that you can learn to anticipate challenges that will develop. You may not want to avoid the issues because they need to surface; however, you do not want to be surprised or caught off guard.
Walk through the steps to see if you can produce the desired results with the proposed participants. Do the steps allow the group to build on prior work without jumping around? Are the steps logical? Will the deliverables be comprehensive?
NOTE: Identify the known information at the start of the proposed workshop. Because some information was probably built before this workshop. It may be output from prior workshops. It may be planning or scope documents. Therefore, this information should only be reviewed and not built from scratch, if acceptable.
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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.
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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.
