You’ve made plans, got people on board and kicked off your project.. but as the focus turns to delivery, how do you keep the momentum going?
We’ve found that much of the trick of successful project management is helping people to make clear commitments, which are visible to the entire team, and then doing everything you can to help them achieve that.
One of the simplest ways to make commitments and progress visible is schedule regular time to review these with the team.
Assuming that you’ll be meeting weekly, there are three questions you need to address at that weekly review…
- What did we plan to do this week?
- What actually happened this week?
- What re-planning is required to take account of this weeks events?
So to prepare for the weekly meeting, list each of the key milestones and actions that the team agreed to deliver in the last seven days, and get updates from each of the team members on the status of each of these (you can do this in the meeting, but its a much better use of time to begin the meeting with all of the facts already documented). Use the time in the meeting to address the “why’s” of any issues, then move onto re-planning where you need to and setting out the key milestones and action for the next seven days.
Of course. if you are using Milestone Planner with your team then we’ve already done all of the meeting preparation for you. If you make sure you and your team update actions and milestones as they happen, then you’ll find an up-to-date weekly report under the ‘review’ tab for your plan. It contains all of the facts you’ll need to run a really effective weekly team get together…. if you want to send the info out in advance then theres an option to automatically generate a pdf document which you can send out to your team.
So if you want to help your team get more done and be super organised get those weekly sessions in the diary today.