Meetings - Success comes from preparation

Meetings – Preparation makes the meeting

I’m a project manager, working in an Internet related business. Much of my day is spent working with clients and internal support teams as projects are brought together. To put it more simply, I host a lot of meetings.

Now, I’ve been sitting through business meetings for a long time and I’ve experienced good ones and bad ones. Both the good and bad ones have a common trait. The best meetings are a result of great preparation while the bad meetings have little or no preparation.

The agenda should be treated as a script for the meeting; the host needs to ensure that the subject matter is covered and that any follow up tasks are clearly defined. In preparing the agenda, the host needs to let the invited participants know what the meeting is to cover; what roles and responsibilities are defined and/or delegated and what follow up is to be taken. The preparations also need to address the time allotted for the meeting; is there sufficient time for all the items on the agenda?

In the last week I had the good fortune to be invited to a really good meeting as well as one that needed more preparation.

A client had asked to come in to the office and discuss the engagement. The request had come in the form of an e-mail sent to the appropriate members of the account team. In his note he covered, in 3 sentences, the subject of the meeting, time table and the potential outcomes that were to be discussed.

At the meeting he presented his situation, covered the time table and added some additional information that helped support his proposed solution. In less than 20 minutes, all the required conversation was completed and we were working on the solution.

I’m very impressed with the way the host prepared for the meeting. All the participants knew what was to be discussed before hand and were able to respond to his proposals right away. When the proposal was reviewed, all participants went back to their desks knowing what needed to be done and when the customer anticipated final resolution.

Later in the week I was participating in one of those monthly staff meetings that business seems to thrive upon. The host didn’t provide an agenda so we went into the meeting without any clue to the topics that were to be covered. To add to the uncertainty, the invite was for 90 minutes.

The meeting ran just under a half hour; we were shown an overview of the subject matter. There was nothing made available that we could take away from the presentation and review.
In my view, the meeting was not a good one at all. The participants took 90 minutes out of their day and were not prepared for the material presented. No clear statement nor detailed procedure or plan presented that would cover the tasks involved. No doubt there would be additional meetings to cover these details.

Getting back to the preparation component of the meeting, we should do a better job when pulling people in for a meeting; spending the time to get the material assembled and presented before hand leads to a successful outcome.

Just my view.