Best Tips for Running Project Team Meetings as a Project Manager
Nothing is worse than a bad or unproductive meeting… ESPECIALLY on a project!
When you’re running a project, you’ve got no time or energy to lose. It’s a lot of work and the last thing you need is unproductive meetings that only lead to frustration within your team.
So, how can you ensure you run effective meetings EVERY TIME as a project manager?
Here are a few key tips on how to Run Project Management Team Meetings Effectively:
1. Identify the Type of Meeting
This is the first step you need to take to run a really productive and effective project team meeting.
Too many times, people don’t actually know why they’re meeting. They might have an agenda, but it gets off topic quickly.
Understanding the purpose of your meeting helps you tremendously when it comes to planning, preparing, sending out a pre-read, figuring out who needs to be there, and staying on topic at your meeting.
So, make it a priority to understand why you’re calling that meeting and what exactly you’re hoping to get out of it.
Throughout a project life cycle, there are different points in time where your meetings will take on a different purpose. Some examples of project meeting purposes could be brainstorming, getting approval, or even issue resolution. Understanding those underlying purposes as to why you’re calling the meeting will help you ensure that the meeting is focused and productive.
2. Prepare & Plan
After knowing your purpose for the meeting, you need to prepare and plan for it.
You may have to create a pre-read, get information from other people, create an agenda, determine the length of your meeting, and send your agenda out at least 48-72 hours before the meeting.
One thing I love to do is highlight the purpose of the meeting in my initial email invite with a little note that says “agenda to follow soon.” This ensures that people know what the meeting is for, they know that more information is coming, and they are more likely to accept it immediately.
More Tips on Running Effective Project Meetings
There are a few more tips you should know when it comes to running super effective project meetings. Head over to YouTube with me because I created a video going a lot more in-depth on these tips and more so that you never again have a time-wasting meeting.
If you want even more project manager tips on every aspect of managing a successful project, make sure you check out my SLAY Project Management course where I give you all the templates, tips, and techniques to implement if you want a 100% project success rate going forward.
-Adriana