The one area where i consistently find poor management is in the running of meetings. For effective and efficient meetings project managers need to take control and keep them entirely project focused. Some tips below.

• No meeting needs to be longer than 30 minutes unless the agenda and complexity of the content necessitate it.

• Remember the mind can wander and concentration levels will subside the longer a meeting goes on so the value of continuing meetings past 30 minutes needs to be evaluated.

• Meetings should have clear agendas with time allocated to each discussion point.

• Take control and do not tolerate unnecessary interjections that add no value to the meeting, disrupt the flow and are not agenda items.

• For short incisive meetings with clear focus stand ups of 15 minutes work well.

• When using PowerPoints make sure the slides are not overloaded with text and contain clear, concise and are easy to follow messaging.

• Rule of thumb dictates that PowerPoints should be around the 5 – 7 limit, and definitely not more than 10. Once you go past this amount the value diminishes and the audience will tend to waiver.

• Attendee numbers & having the correct attendees is critical. Rule of thumb dictates that attendee numbers should fall between 5 & 9, reason being have less than 5 and there may not be enough participants to necessitate a meeting in the first place and the value and quality may not be at a requisite level. On the flip side go past 9 members and there may be too many people to control and also the risk is you have attendees who are just there to listen and not participate and add value. Use the required and optional attendance options wisely, add unnecessary optional attendees and risk is the numbers become too large. It’s only essential to have those who are needed  to discuss the agenda, they should be subject matter experts, decision makers etc.

• When a meeting is scheduled for longer than hour consider breaking it up, the problem is if meeting duration is too long it can become akin to a workshop quite quickly.

• Notes and actions are important but be careful not let that get in the way of effective listening. Make sure you understand the meeting content and ultimate output. 

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms like Microsoft CoPilot (linked to Teams), Google Gemini or/and ChatGPT to name a few can now create summaries of meetings and actions within that.

• Project Status & Steer co meetings are completely different, remember to communicate the aims and desired outputs of every meeting and avoid duplication as you don’t want to be wasting stakeholders valuable time.

• Remember less is more, ask yourself the question do you really need this meeting, if the answer is no or sort of then don’t have it, find other ways to get what you need. As the saying goes there is more than one way to skin a cat🤷🏼‍♂️

• Frequency of meetings is important, have meetings too often and the quality of content can be poor and you will frustrate and annoy attendees, have them too sporadically and important information and decisions may not get shared or made. Use your project management skills to assess what is needed here but very few if any meetings need to be daily so always start at weekly & fortnightly as a baseline.

• Remember having meetings can get in the way of doing valuable project work so try not to have more than 40% of your time in meetings each week & if you get to a situation where it’s over 50% then analyse your meetings and reschedule & manage accordingly. Don’t let excessive meetings get in the way of project quality and delivery