TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

How does it go most of the time

It all depends how fortunate you are…

Not so fortunate

You just sit together with the same old bunch over and over. And what’s worse, each time you discuss the same topics. And for the problems you are having, nothing is really decided or done.

A little bit fortunate

Somebody (or his lovely assistant) takes notes during the meeting. Typically in word or excel or whatever. These ‘meeting minutes’ are then emailed to you (hopefully) before the next meeting. What’s still missing is that nobody is really dealing with the issues.

Fairly fortunate

You do not only have a meeting minutes, but there is some action list at the end of the minutes. Hopefully with a due date, owner and priority. There are still some problems in this scenario as we have witnessed on many occasions. At the start of each meeting, you make the ‘tour du table’ to verify if everybody has done what was agreed. The variety of excuses is staggering: “I didn’t receive the email”, “I did not see any attachment”, “The actions for me were in color and I have printed it on a black and white printer”,..

You are still fairly handicapped

Even when you are nicely taking meeting minutes, with identified actions, nicely distributed to all participants in time, you only have limited ways to push forward your team. Only when you sit together with the team, you can move things. It’s at that moment that actions can be decided and decisions made. So this means you are limited depending on the meeting frequency. Once a week for simple progress meetings, monthly for more elaborate steering committees and alike. So in week 1 you decide on an action, in week 2 the action is postponed because of some stupid misunderstanding, and if you are lucky you can expect the result in week 3.

If you want things to go faster, you need intermediate activity: you hold one on one meetings with the guy or lady responsible to push things forward.

What we came up with

Someone receiving an action decided in a meeting needs to be confronted with it constantly. So our solution is to show actions coming from a meeting with the rest of the operational and project work. And it is natural tendency for all of us to be happy when we can tick things of. So instead of being able to push things forward only once per week or month, you can now be sure that things are pushed constantly.

Bonus feature…

When we automate all this, we can offer an administration support for regular meetings and actions. An action that is closed does not need to be discussed in the next meeting. So we save time at the start of the meeting because the system tells us the status, there is no need to do a review of all actions. Any outstanding action from last time is automatically part of the ongoing actions.