The Project Meeting Facilitator

Facilitation Skills to Make the Most of Project Meetings

Tammy Adams, Janet A. Means, Michael Spivey

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780787987060
• eBook ISBN: 9781119120216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Project Management
• Index: Business

Have you ever been involved in a project that didn't require a meeting? Neither have we. Well-run project meetings allow teams to get through the maze of distractions and obstacles to achieve results. Unfortunately, many project meetings aren't well-run—they are viewed, by team members, as unproductive, tedious, wastes of precious time. But you can change that. The Project Meeting Facilitator contains practical techniques and practices that will help you facilitate our meetings more effectively, transforming them into well-planned, well-managed journeys that engage the team while achieving the intended goals.

Section II
Facilitating Meetings Within Each Phase of the Project

TIME TO GET TO WORK! There is no substitute for applying what you have read or learned to real-life situations. Look at every project meeting experience as an invaluable opportunity to refine your facilitation skills. There is no better way to improve your facilitation skills than to practice, practice, practice! Because your role as project manager assumes that you’ll be holding and leading a variety of meetings, why not learn by doing—applying facilitation skills to your future project meetings?

Chapters One through Four provided the basics about meeting facilitation and tools. They highlighted the role of the project meeting facilitator (PMF) and outlined the facilitation tools and techniques that apply to all meetings—large or small, complex or simple. Now Chapters Five through Nine will take a look at the specific meetings that may occur within a project to better understand

• Where each meeting best fits in the project meeting road map
• Meeting purpose and objectives
• Suggested participants
• Typical inputs required for the meeting
• Expected outputs of each meeting
• Suggested agenda topics

To make this information easier to use in your everyday project life, we’ve combined these meeting detail tables found in each chapter into a master list—Project Meetings by Phase—which can be found on the website.

In each chapter, we’ll provide an outline of where meetings typically fall in the framework of the project meeting road map. We’ve listed the phases: initiate, plan, execute, control, and close. The PMI publication A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: PMBOK Guide (PMI, 2004) suggests that these terms be used for project management processes, which occur within each phase of the project lifecycle (that is, within any phase you are actually initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing). Some authors in the project management field also have used these to name the overall phases of the project lifecycle. As you read through Section Two, we follow the pattern of introducing this terminology as the phases of the project.

Figure II.1 depicts the project meetings outlined in Chapter Two along with a recommendation of where these meetings fall within the framework of the five project phases.

We have shown the relationship between the sequential project phases and the meetings in Figure II.1. One point of clarification as we begin to discuss project phases and their corresponding meetings: we have found that many organizations work concurrently on certain aspects of project phases. This is often done to decrease the overall project duration, speeding up the time to market. Encouraging project teams to work on activities concurrently often results in the overlapping of the project phases depicted in Figure II.2. For example, many organizations begin to “control” the changes by holding change control meetings (see Chapter Eight) in the execute phase as soon as certain anchoring project deliverables have been officially approved. By overlapping these phases, project managers are able to influence changes earlier in the project, while the product is being built, rather than waiting to monitor change controls during post-build activities. As you can see in Figure II.2, the overlapping of phases differs from the more traditional waterfall approach outlined in Figure II.1. Keep in mind that with both approaches, the project meetings described in this book still need to take place—whether your organization follows the more traditional sequential phase or the overlapping phase approach.

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FIGURE II.1 Meetings Within the Project Phases

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FIGURE II.2 Overlapping of Project Phases

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We chose to use the Project Management Institute (PMI) project management process framework for our discussion because PMI is recognized as the leading organization for setting the standards for managing projects in organizations around the globe. We realize that there are a number of project lifecycle frameworks in the marketplace today. In fact, many organizations have developed their own internal project lifecycle phases to “chunk” the work into various groupings to assist with moving a project from start to finish. So you may have to translate the terminology presented here into that used by your organization.

There are a number of project meetings (both single point in time and recurring) that take place during the lifecycle of any project. Figure II.3 provides another view of the meetings that we will be discussing in the next five chapters. We refer to this model as the Project Meeting Road Map.

Ultimately, the application of project meeting facilitation is never complete unless you ask yourself what works well and what does not. Facilitators can have an excellent grasp of various techniques, but not knowing when to apply them to real-life situations can lead to disaster. At the end of each chapter in this section, you will find a list of what has worked well in these types of meetings and what hasn’t. These nuggets come from our own client experiences and are presented to you with the intent of accelerating your learning and preventing blunders we’ve unintentionally made.

As you read each chapter, ask yourself. “What would work best in my situation?” Don’t be afraid to step out of the norm and try something new or different. Great facilitators know when to make informed judgments and change direction in a meeting situation as appropriate; they do not simply follow a cookie-cutter approach.

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FIGURE II.3 The Project Meeting Road Map

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Chapter 5
Facilitating Project Initiation Meetings

If your project doesn’t work, look for the part that you didn’t think was important.

—ARTHUR BLOCH, author of Murphy’s Law

INITIATE. THE MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY defines initiate as “to cause or facilitate the beginning of.” As project meeting facilitators and project managers, we are requested to do just that whenever we engage in a project. However, organizations often skip the initiate phase all together. This can lead to disastrous consequences.

Have you ever been in this situation? Someone stops you in the hallway to run a great new concept by you. You listen intently and provide some constructive feedback about the idea. A few weeks go by and you hear nothing. You may have even forgotten about the hallway conversation. And then quite unexpectedly, you are assigned as the project manager of “a wonderfully new and exciting effort”—which, by the way, is already behind schedule.

This happened to Joe, a new project manager at Allied Corp. His new assignment was to launch the same new product concept that had been mentioned to him several weeks earlier. He was told that his number-one priority, as the newly assigned project manager,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• More Praise for The Project Meeting Facilitator
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Section I: Project Facilitation Basics
• Section II: Facilitating Meetings within Each Phase of the Project
• Section III: Resources and References
• The Authors
• References
• Index
• Wiley End User License Agreement