Have you ever attended a meeting and wonder what it was about? Have you've been in meetings that seem to go on forever without focus? Have you ever been in a meeting where there was endless discussion and no decisions? Communication within a team and to stakeholder is critical for team success. One agenda item for the first meeting might be a written communication plan. What should be communicated, to whom, when, and how? In this presentation we'll talk about some tools that help you run efficient and effective meetings. First, some basic elements. Every meeting should have a specific purpose. What do you hope to accomplish with this meeting? If there's not a purpose, why are you having a meeting? Identifying the purpose helps to keep the team on task. An agenda should be created and distributed well before the meeting, so everyone knows what will be discussed and decided. After the meeting, minutes should be distributed to reinforce what decisions were made and who is responsible for action items. Finally we will look at status reports and how to communicate the progress of your team. Teams have roles and responsibilities, meeting do too. The roles and responsibilities may be the same for the meeting as for the team but they do not have to be. There should always be designated meeting leader. This could be the team leader in an early meetings it probably will be. If possible it's a good idea to have an experienced facilitator particularly in early stages. The facilitator can help to keep the team on task. A time keeper could help to keep the team on time. Finally, you need a scribe to prepare the agenda in conjunction with the leader to record decision on action items and to distribute the minutes. These roles may be static particularly in early stages of team development. Later when the team is in the performing stage it might be desirable to rotate roles. No one wants to be described all of the time. As team members gain skill and confidence, they can take turns leading or facilitating meetings. Think of this as cross training and career development. This is a sample template for a meeting agenda. You can customize this any way you want. This template can be used electronically or in paper form. Begin to create the agenda by filling out the top of the form. Who is having a meeting? What is its purpose? Fill in the date, the beginning and ending times, and the location. We've numbered the team members, but put in actual names of all the team members. If you're expecting any guests, be sure to include them both on the agenda and in your distribution. Then assign roles of meeting leader, time keeper, scribe and possibly facilitator. The bottom part of the agenda addresses what will happen in the meeting. List the topics or items that will be discussed and decided. Be realistic, don't put things on the agenda that you know you will not have time to get to. For each topic assign a specific amount of time. Your agenda is now complete. Be sure to distribute this to all team members and guests. You might want to copy your sponsor for informational purposes. In order to use the agenda, start you meeting on time, if members are missing, do not wait. This maybe a problem in the first couple of meetings but it will quickly reinforce the importance of being on time. First, mark who is in attendance from a list team members. During your meeting, the scribe will fill out the last three columns and the remarks row. If your meeting room has the capability it is a good ideas to project the agenda and fill in the teams decisions as they're made. This makes for clear communication, and also reinforces consensus and support for team decisions. As you go through the agenda, the timekeeper should remind the leader about allotted time. If the time for an agenda time is used up it should not be extended unless the team agrees. The team should be made aware that if we extend the time for topic one for example, we may not have time for topic five in this meeting. For this reason it may be good idea to arrange agenda items in the order of importance. Now you need to create the minutes, when the meeting is concluded and resolve of all agenda, topics are filled in, you can create the minutes. The simplest way to do this is to go to the top left of the form and change the word agenda to minutes. Immediately after the meeting, distribute the minutes to the same list that you sent the agenda to, plus any new guests or stakeholders that the team may have added to the distributions list. Using a standard form or template like this makes it simple to create an agenda, keep the team on task and on time then to convert the agenda to minutes for distribution. Periodically you will need to provide status reports to your sponsor, perhaps to steering committee and others. This might be the part of toll gate review or another intervals. These reports can be easily prepared from your meeting minutes and the results of your used quality tools. Remember, you might want to communicate your process as well as your results. You can easily prepare a template for these reports as we did with the meeting agenda. This slide lists a number of things that might be included on that template. A structured and organized approach to communication using tools such as these will great improve your team's chances for success.