When it comes to remote work teams, meetings are an essential activity for getting aligned on expectations and working efficiently together. They are also a great tool to connect with your colleagues. However, to avoid wasting time, it’s important to make meeting more effective.

As one of the project managers at WebDevStudios, I have some useful tips.

5 Tips to Make Your Meetings More Effective

1. Reassess the purpose.

Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of this meeting?” Routine meetings are often scheduled at a point in the project when they are necessary.

While these meetings were effective at one point in time, it’s important to reassess these calls to determine if they are still relevant. If you find yourself saying, “This could have been an email,” after a recurring call, it’s likely time to cancel it.

2. Include the right people in your meetings.

Ask yourself, “Who needs to be on this call?” Depending on the purpose of your call, make sure you know who from your team actually needs to be included.

Will you need a specific team member’s input or expertise on an issue? Or, do you need to brainstorm a blocker with the full team?

Do you need some additional support on a client call, and who is best to provide that? To ensure you aren’t wasting your team’s time or resources, make sure to only include those who need to be in attendance.

3. Prepare an agenda.

To really make your meetings more effective, set clear expectations for the call up front using an agenda. It should be a brief outline of what needs to be discussed.

Feel free to send the meeting agenda out to all participants prior to the call to set the meeting up for success. For example, if the point of your call is to discuss a specific feature or request, use your agenda to outline the key points that need to be clarified or addressed.

4. Control the meeting, but not the conversation.

If the people in your meeting are the essential parties needed to participate in the discussion, they will all have an important role to play for your call. While you are in charge of leading the meeting, make sure that you are facilitating in a way that everyone is able to chime in.

Call facilitators should start a meeting by defining the agenda and setting the tone for what should be accomplished. After that, it’s time to back off and let the discussion begin.

Toward the end of the call, it’s time for the facilitator to jump back in to guide the call conclusion and define next steps. This leads me to my next point.

5. End on time and define the action items.

If you are facilitating a call, you should always aim to end on time. Hopefully, you have guided your team to stay on track throughout the call to support this.

However, in the event that you need to end a meeting, it is okay to let all participants know that it is time to wrap up. An easy way to communicate this is simply by stating, “I have a hard stop at [X] time.”

If you find yourself needing to end a call due to time limitations, wrap it up with a summary of the action items that need to be completed following the meeting. Identify who is responsible for completing them. Once next steps have been communicated and agreed upon, everyone should be aligned on what is happening next.

Conclusion

Ultimately, you’ll need to customize your approach to making meetings more effective in a way that fits your company. However, if you are overwhelmed with meetings, I hope these tips help.

The post 5 Tips to Make Your Meetings More Effective appeared first on WebDevStudios.

Many people wonder why they need a project manager for their projects and team. They may even think it’s a waste of time and resources. However, the benefits of project management far outweigh the costs. In fact, project management results in higher client satisfaction, reputation improvement, and less risk for your projects and company. Before we can address the full benefits of having a formal project management process, however, we need to note who the beneficiaries are.

Who Benefits from Project Management?

Project management not only sets your team up for success, but also guarantees quality projects and services for your customers. Between new projects, a growing team, and more and more clients, it becomes increasingly more difficult to stay organized and communicate with your team.

When you have a project manager to organize and oversee projects, you have someone tracking the scope, budget, and timing of everything in your workload. Projects that come in on time, on budget, and cover scope, make for happy clients; and for WebDevStudios where client success is our mission, client happiness is our goal every time.

We’re all about client satisfaction, but we also enjoy employee satisfaction. Project management provides the support and communication to keep our team in the loop and up to date on all projects. Not only can project managers provide strong communication for projects, but they also manage and balance workloads between team members. This prevents unnecessary stress and allows proper work-life balance for all employees, resulting in a happy and healthy team!

What Are the Benefits of Project Management?

Now that we’ve covered the who, let’s get into the what. What are the benefits to project management?

Project managers are key to maintaining project organization, quality communication between stakeholder and team members, and overseeing all the steps and milestones of a project from the initial contact to completion. They facilitate the full project process, ensuring the scope is met, the project remains within budget, and quality communication is had between stakeholders and team members.

A project manager at WebDevStudios will:

• Schedule and plan for necessary meetings with stakeholders and ensure transparent communication with clients throughout the project life cycle
• Define the project scope, based on the project proposal and prior communication
• Coordinate and manage tasks and milestones of a project
• Handle and ensure quality communication between team members
• Manage the project timeline and budget from initiation to completion
• Plan resources based on client’s budgetary expectations
• Use proper project management tools and software to organize the project’s team and scope
• Ensure top-notch work by overseeing and scheduling the quality assurance process

And more…

Why Should I Have a Project Manager on My Project?

If you’re not convinced yet, let’s talk about the why. Why should I have a project manager overseeing my project? Project management has proven to be a key part to finding success when working on projects.

In fact, the Pulse of the Profession study found that businesses with clear project management processes are 38% more successful at meeting project goals when compared to those without. And, when a typical one in six IT projects have a cost overrun of 200%, it’s important to have someone watching the scope and budget.

Even outside of the IT world, the same study found that with businesses documenting high project failure rate, 41% were attributed to a lack of involvement from project management.

At WebDevStudios, you can always count on having a skilled project manager overseeing your website build. Does your team use project management? How do they contribute to the project process? Please comment below on how project managers have benefited your project workflow!

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