Meetings are common in every business sector, but there might be a lot of them in the IT industry due to the nature of the work.

Top Tips on Conducting an Effective Meeting During Software Projects

However, sometimes these meetings actually slow down progress instead of helping ensure that tasks move forward.

When you work on a complex project like custom software development, every team member needs to collaborate closely to achieve meaningful results. And to achieve that, first, the meetings should be effective.

An effective meeting brings new ideas to life, opens up opportunities, encourages diverse opinions, helps analyze actions, and offers much more. Now, how to conduct such an effective meeting? How to make sure that the meetings we conduct stay positive and productive?

If all of these questions bother you, let us give you a few meeting tips to help you hold effective meetings in software projects.

1. Create an efficient meeting agenda

An instant meeting can be effective only if it serves its purpose well. So, what’s the purpose of your meeting? First, you must prepare an agenda for your software project management meeting.

• What will be the main topic of discussion?
• How many items will be on the agenda?

We need to find answers to many of these questions. Moreover, you must relay the meeting agenda to your team members in advance. It gives them time to come prepared for the meetings. Everyone attending the meeting must have clear expectations and talking points in mind; otherwise, the meeting will be less fruitful.

If need be, use a tool like Fellow to help you make an agenda for the upcoming meeting. The tool must be easy to use and collaborative. It helps you keep things from falling apart and ensure everyone has clear takeaways from the meeting.

2. Invite only those who need to be there

Only some team members handle the key responsibilities of the project, so there’s no need to invite everyone to the meetings. Of course, everyone is working on the same software development project and must know what they should do next.

But it is possible to conduct the meeting with only key team members and then later pass on the meeting notes to other team members to keep them updated. The fewer the attendees will be, the more you will be able to achieve your goals of an effective project meeting.

Be sure to reschedule the meeting whenever a key member of the project team is unable to participate. Because the absence of a key team member will keep you wondering about the updates on their work, and it’s better to get them when they are available. That ought to keep your meeting productive and meaningful.

Read also: 5 CEOs Share Their Tips on Corporate Training

3. Look back and look forward

The concept of “look back and look forward” tells you to review your previous and upcoming timelines. The time is not fixed, just whatever you consider ideal or important for your project. Doing so will help your team reflect on your past work. Remember what worked well and what didn’t? Take notes from that.

Then it is time to analyze the current state of affairs. What is the progress on the current work? Are there any problems in completing them? If yes, then how can those problems be resolved? And more.

After that, do the same for your upcoming tasks. Discuss in length what would be the best approach to yield maximum results. What might be the potential hurdles in the way? And so on.

Always discuss the issues at hand first and then how to move forward. If you use this technique, you must keep a few things in mind.

• Create a schedule for your project. It must include everything that must be done in the next 2-4 weeks (depending on you).
• Mark important tasks of the project as milestones or achievements.
• It would be best if you also considered the upcoming events.
• Have the project manager or a key team member anticipate all potential risks in your scheduled timeline or until your project is completed.

4. Assign meeting roles to stay focused

Assigning meeting roles in advance is very important, no matter what your agenda is. Everyone must know what responsibilities they bear when they enter the meeting room. It might be the key to conducting effective meetings.

The roles you can assign for the meeting can be categorized as follows:

• Meeting organizer: This person must take responsibility for arranging the meetings, scheduling the time, sharing the agenda, and inviting key team members for it.
• Meeting host: To ensure that the meeting stays on track, the host is responsible for discussing the agenda and yielding better results that make the meeting effective.
• The note-taker: Notes are essential. Sometimes there might be a mistake in communication, or people might forget the details of the discussion. Hence, it is crucial to assign a person responsible for taking notes of every decision made in the meeting, Q&As, key takeaways, and more.
• The timekeeper: One person must be responsible for seeing to it that meetings start and end on time. This makes it important for the meeting organizer to ensure enough time to discuss all the items on the agenda.
• The decision-maker: The responsibility of this person is the authority to make decisions on important matters. What this person says goes. This person must also ensure everyone is aware and on board with their decisions.
• The voice of the customer: This responsibility must be given to the person representing the customer or someone who clearly understands their requirements and can view things from their perspective.

5. Leverage tech tools

Using a suitable project management tool and powerful webinar software can make all the difference between making your meeting more effective and productive and ending up just wasting time.

The parameters to choose the right software development tools will largely depend upon the size of your software development project, your team size, and your project’s timeline. Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Monday, and Timely Task are some of the famous names of the large pool of project management tools available in the market.

6. Wrap up efficiently

It’s important to wrap things up after discussing every item on the agenda list in the meeting. Summarize all the key points of the meeting, including the decisions that were made, Q&As, and what you planned to act on next. This will provide clarity to your team members on the work and ensure that everyone is updated on what you discussed in the meeting.

Conclusion

To make your software project management meetings effective, you can only follow some strategies or best practices you can grab a hold on. Techniques vary with the project’s size, team, complexity level, and many other factors. Moreover, you will need team members committed to their tasks and responsibilities to the core. After all, they are the ones acting on those strategies.

Having all of these in place would still not guarantee you an effective meeting. You have to encourage an authentic and fruitful conversation in meetings. Communicate to reflect on the previous actions, whether failures or successes and then improvise to achieve better results.

The meeting tips discussed in this article can help you avoid wasting time and turn your meetings into a way to solve problems effectively in software projects.

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