6 Tools To Use In Project Management By Richard Batenburg, Business Solutions Expert

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Agenda - The person calling the meeting (host) must use an Agenda and publish it at least 12 hours prior to meeting. The first item on the agenda is always to review the minutes and action items from the last meeting.

Minutes - The meeting host must assign a scribe to take minutes. The minutes should include action items, the action items need to be assigned to a resource and a deliverable date negotiated.

Attendee Recap - The meeting host must require all attendees to send a recap of the meeting from their perspective to the scribe within 60 minutes of meeting end.

Issues and Risks – During any meeting issues arise these items should be categorized and logged. The definition of an issue is something internal that needs attention. The definition of risk is generally external to the project or falls into the ´acts of God´ category. Issues must be assigned to a team member and a deliverable date for resolution agreed upon. Risks must be documented and mitigation plans discussed, agreed upon, resources assigned.

Status Reports – Perhaps the single most important tool the Status Report should be generated weekly and contain very brief synopsis of the overall project, status of meeting milestones, events that occurred that week and references to the Issues and Risks uncovered or overcome.

Communication Plan – This is more than a contact list for hierarchical command structure diagram - although those are components. The plan must define the types of communication the project team and stakeholders will engage in over the course of the project. The plan should also state who is responsible for what types of communication and when the communication will occur. Its most important to not take communication for granted or even worse blast everything to everyone! Assumption that communication will occur is obviously a poor one and blasting everything to everyone causes the team to become numb to all messaging (crying wolf) and/or devaluing the information.

Sounds easy – because it is, what is hard is making the commitment to change and then making the change stick - which we will talk about in our next installment.

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