Facilitation Skills to Make the Most of Project Meetings
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN INVOLVED in a project that didn’t require a meeting? Neither have we. Project meetings provide a forum for exchanging information, coming up with new ideas or alternatives, making decisions, validating work products, or just learning how to work better together. They can occur on a regular basis or on the spur of the moment. They may involve two people or thirty. But regardless, project meetings are intended to achieve results. And most times you, the project manager, are expected to make it happen – whether you’ve had facilitation experience or not. So in Section One, we’ll give you some guidelines, insights, tool, and techniques to help you make any meeting you lead more productive.
There are always more project meetings than time. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could maximize your effort by…
- knowing what works & doesn’t work for each type of project meeting?
- having pre-defined agenda’s & templates for your meetings?
- being prepared to head off meeting problems before they trip you up?
The Project Meeting Facilitator can help. You’ll get practical techniques, templates and advice that will transform your project meetings into time-saving events that move your project forward.
Tammy Adams, Janet Means, and Michael S. Spivey are independent consultants and Certified Professional Facilitators with years of experience in guiding project teams to produce key project deliverables. They combine their years of experience in hands-on project management, process design, supporting technology design and group facilitation to bring proven practical assistance to companies who need to improve their ability to execute and internalize change.
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING…
For anyone thrown into the stormy world of managing project meetings and herding humans, the Project Meeting Facilitator provides the definitive survival kit to enable the preparation, management and successful achievement of results from the necessary evil of project meetings. Tammy Adams, Jan Means and Michael Spivey have combined their years of experience in real world facilitation and teaching to provide any facilitator with a “Who, What, When and When Not” guide, supported by real tools, examples and pitfalls.
Dale Carr, Manager, Business Analysis
Jan, Tammy, and Michael have done it again! Their previous masterwork, Facilitating the Project Lifecycle, was a must-have for every project manager. This time their focus is even sharper: a whole book devoted specifically to the facilitator’s role – and to the skills and mindset required to execute that role effectively. This book is so loaded with tools, techniques and templates that even seasoned project managers will keep their copies close at hand.
Sam Kaner, Author of Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making
Ineffective meetings become a thing of the past when you put the ideas in the ‘The Project Meeting Facilitator’ into practice. The authors not only offer a practical guide to every type of meeting in the project life cycle, but let practitioners know when they have taken a wrong turn.
William M. Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. and Author of Legacy Systems: Transformation Strategies
Being a facilitative project manager may seem like an oxymoron to some, but it is the underlying success criteria in most collaborative environments and is the underlying theme throughout The Project Meeting Facilitator. The book is focused on traditional project meeting facilitation techniques but is easily applied in more iterative approaches like Agile, Lean or Design-Build methodologies.
David Spann, Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF)Past MBA Director at Westminster College (Salt Lake City, Utah) and President of Agile Adaptive Management
Finally, a book that specifically addresses the unique facilitation skills required in Project Management Meetings. PMs can easily match the different types of Project Management meetings with the skill levels and processes best suited for what they are trying to accomplish in each.
Charles Tombazian, DirectorGlobal Strategic Planning at Avnet, Inc.
