All of you might have specific experiences with project meetings: long, boring, and without results. Although this happens quite often, this is not necessary, and worse: it will make your project a failure.

To say it simply: there are big and small meetings. A “Joint Project Planning Session” (JPPS) is an example for a big project meeting.

A Joint Project Planning Session is a meeting that brings together all partners of a big project in order to agree on the final version of the project plan. "All partners" means the obvious counterparts: “project requestor(s)”, who is/are paying for the project, and the “project provider(s)”, who receive(s) money for the project. This arrangement can be aided by a mediator between those parties, e.g., a GI consulter.

Please keep in mind that similar “big project meetings” will be performed during the project in order to agree on fulfillment of major project deliverables – or identify non-fulfillment, requiring correcting actions. These meetings are important tools for monitoring and controlling a project (see chapter 3 of this module).

However, small meetings, internally performed by working groups, have the same importance for the project’s progress as the big ones. They are also important tools for monitoring and controlling

The rules for big and small meetings are similar. Therefore, this section will add some personal experiences to the recommendations of the textbook.

Before you proceed, please read chapter 4, pp. 117-124, of the textbook (Wysocki 2009).

Preparation of a meeting

The first you should consider: Does a meeting make sense? You should only schedule a meeting if there is a need for it. You should be able to define clear topics, goals, and expected outcomes.

Attendees have to be invited in time. In small meetings, a couple of days might be sufficient. The more partners, the longer and complex the meeting, and the bigger the distance, the earlier the dates have to be settled. In some EC projects it is already complicated to schedule a meeting half a year ahead of time.

An invitation goes along with an agenda, which includes:

• Overall topic
• Place and date
• Schedule, including start, breaks, and, most important, the END of the meeting. It is ambitious to exactly calculate the time for each topic. Reserve a buffer: everybody will be happy if the time buffer is not needed and the meeting finishes earlier. Nobody will be happy if the meeting lasts one hour longer.
• Moderator of the meeting
• Participants
• Topics
  • Issues or action items to be clarified or decided
  • Persons responsible for preparing or presenting a topic
• Background information as an input for the meeting (see next section)

Meeting input

If a project meeting starts with the sentence “Let’s start talking about this topic” you immediately know that you can start surfing in the internet or do your emails – if you were lucky enough not to forget to bring your laptop to the meeting.

Project meetings are for

• Approval/disapproval of results,
• Decisions,
• And (in some cases) problem-solving in knowledge-based discussions.

Projects meetings are definitely not for

• Starting discussions from scratch
• Exchange of thoughts about this and that.

This requires an input for the project meeting, which

• Is a physical document containing all necessary information for the meeting
• Is provided before the meeting, so that the attendees can be prepared for the meeting and are on a similar level.

In case of a JPPS, the input will be the project proposal (compare Wysocki (2003), chapter 8, and module 1 of this course). In case of a big project meeting during a project, it might be the documentation of a prototype, which has to be approved. In case of an internal working group meeting, it might be a documented suggestion why and how a functionality of the new software system should be changed.

If you are not alone responsible for the meeting input, make sure to have responsible partners and deadlines for providing this input.

Attendees

The attendees of a big project meeting can be grouped in three roles:

1. The moderator of a meeting has an important and difficult task: leading the meeting to a successful outcome in terms of results. He/she can be of one of the parties (project requester or provider). But especially if you are expecting a controversial meeting, a (more or less) neutral moderator, e.g., a GI consulter can be the better choice.
2. The decision makers must attend in order to be able to come up with results. In the case of a JPPS, somebody must be able to decide, e.g., if a work package can be postponed or costs might increase by 10 %.
3. Some attendees must be aware what the project work is really about (which is not necessarily the decision maker). The experts have to add their know-how, e.g., saying, in a JPPS, that an additional functionality is missing or the tasks of a work package can definitely not be performed in one week.

In internal meetings, the composition of attendees is quite the same; differences might be a less formal environment, and the fact that (mostly) the working group does not consist of contrary parties but on a homogenous working group with common goals.

Facilities and equipment

Especially for big meetings, the preparation starts with the location. If international partners are traveling to you, don´t make a meeting “at a nice place”, which is miles from nowhere, requiring an additional 3-hour bus trip after your guest has just crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

For meetings longer than one day, you also have to take into consideration accommodation, meals, and social events after the meetings.

The meeting room has to be appropriate, not only in terms of size, but also in terms of ambiance – welcoming project partners in the ugliest room you have will provide a bad start.

The required equipment will vary. Some examples to think of:

• Beamer
• Presentation Laptop
• Flip chart
• Name tags (if not all attendees know each other)

And make sure shortly before the meeting that everything works!

Meeting results

If you will start thinking about meeting results during the meeting, the meeting will be a disaster. My personal recommendation: write the meeting minutes – including results – BEFORE the meeting. Only if you have a clear idea what the meeting results will be, will you be able to achieve results.

Basically, there a two types of results: decisions and action items. When preparing the meeting minutes before the meeting, the last two sections should be a decision list and a to-do list. For example:

Decisions:

1. The prototype was approved – no changes necessary.
2. The next meeting will be in Münster, at ifgi, Dec 10, 2007.
3. 500 € of the budget item “consumables” will be transferred to the budget item “travel costs”.

Action Items:

Welcome a guest

The bigger the meeting, the more important it is to make your project partners feel comfortable. Consider the invited meeting attendees as your guests. Please think to yourself what would help you to enjoy a trip to a project meeting in Switzerland. A small collection of supporting and comforting services:

• Attach travel information to your invitation and agenda (e.g., which airports are appropriate, buses from airport to city, buses from train station to meeting location….)
• Add some tourist information about the city
• Offer to make hotel reservations for all attendees
• Think of a social event after the meeting, e.g., having dinner in a nice restaurant
• Provide handouts of all relevant documents, even if you have sent them digitally
• Provide coffee, juice, water, cookies…. during the meeting.
• Plan a meeting lunch, which is better than serving cheese sandwiches.

Performing the meeting

Assuming that everything is prepared, coffee and handouts on the table, you can start the meeting. Start on time! And even more important: Finish in time. You will not make many friends if you extend the meeting for an hour – the fact is that you might end up alone with your partners already running to the train station or the next meeting. And making a meeting longer does not necessarily produce more results.

It is the difficult task of the moderator to keep within the time schedule. The positive approach is to guide the discussions in a goal-oriented and problem-solving way. But sometimes it is necessary to use a negative approach: kill never-ending discussions and small talk – of course, in a friendly and sensible way.

Two personal recommendations:

1. For some types of meetings, the following strategy works well: Use your previously prepared meeting minutes and project them on the wall visibly for all attendees. During the meeting, you are typing new information, decisions, action items…. directly into the document. This way everybody sees what you are doing, can comment, and agree/disagree on the common understanding of what is happening during the meeting. Another advantage: The meeting minutes are ready directly after the meeting.
2. Reserve 10 – 30 minutes at the end of the meeting for going through all decisions and action items of the meeting. It will help all participants to get a mutual understanding of the meeting results and avoid misunderstandings; it will help you not to forget anything; and the persons responsible for certain action items will feel more responsible for really doing what they are supposed to do.

After the meeting

An obvious task is to provide all participants with the meeting minutes. In more formal meetings, partners have 1-2 weeks for comments or corrections, before the meeting minutes are considered as approved.

The most important task of the project manager is to control if the agreed action items have been fulfilled in time and in the required quality.