Project meetings can be maddening. Some people come unprepared. Others get off track. And how about those that constantly check email. Let's improve your meetings through project meeting roles.

Team members leave meetings with no decisions, lacking direction, and not knowing what to expect next. Power-hungry individuals dominate the discussions. The meek say nothing.

Meetings can be an absolute waste of time and money.

How can we better manage our meetings and get results? Assign meeting roles that combat common meeting problems. 

Friends, have you experienced wasteful project meetings lately? Although meetings are a fundamental communication tool, many meetings fail to achieve real results. Let’s look at four common project meeting problems: unclear purpose, topic hopping, indecision, and unclear direction.

Project managers crave successful software projects. They dream of crossing the finish line with a win. Project managers want to help their company and advance their career. Let's look at three powerful questions to help you identify lessons learned.

Unfortunately, some project managers fall into a rut and fail to make progress. These individuals do the same things from one project to another project and expect a different result. They take the wrong actions, pursue the wrong things and operate under wrong assumptions.

How often have you elicited items such as problems, solutions, or implementation ideas from meeting participants? This sounds simple, but often, participants disagree. The meeting can turn into quicksand. Let's look at the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a powerful technique for reaching consensus.

Imagine that you are planning to facilitate a session to identify the strengths of your organization. What technique would you use to capture their ideas? How would you prioritize the list?

What is the Nominal Group Technique?

The nominal group technique is a structured method for group brainstorming that allows every participant to have an equal voice.  It is a particularly effective tool for larger groups.  The technique saves time, engages participants, and improves the probability of agreement.

I often ask project managers the reasons for project failure. One of the top responses is a lack of leadership and sustained engagement by the project sponsor. The sponsor paints a fuzzy picture of what they want, throws it over the fence to the project manager, and goes on their merry way. He or she essentially says, "Let me know when you're done. Failure is not an option." Really?

Fortunately, some sponsors know how to hit home runs. These sponsors understand that their leadership is essential to a winning season. They stand out from other sponsors by owning their projects and maintaining a healthy relationship with their project managers from the beginning to end of their projects.

Sponsors are typically busy senior executives often coming from the C-suite. In addition to the projects they are sponsoring, the executives have many other responsibilities.

How is it possible for a sponsor to complete their project work and still have time to perform their other duties? Let's look at 10 ways sponsors can boost project success.

Do you and your team members lose track of the things you discussed in your project meetings? Who was to complete that action item? Who owns that risk? What did we decide to do? Sound familiar? Let's talk about how to master project meeting minutes.

When I published my blog post entitled Four Meeting Problems, I received several questions about recording minutes. Questions included:

• Who should scribe?
• What makes a good scribe?
• What should be included in the minutes?
• How do you ensure the minutes are accurate?
• Where should we store minutes?

Allow me to share a few tips. I am reminded of George Orwell's comment: "Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." For both newbies as well as experienced project managers, it is good to get back to the basics.

Have you ever conducted a project brainstorming session and found yourself drowning in a cloud of ideas? Not a bad thing, but how can we make sense of the ideas? Well, let's see how to create a project affinity map to sort your ideas. As a bonus, we'll also look at Dot Voting, a simple and quick way to prioritize your ideas.

So, what steps do we take to create an affinity diagram? Let's walk through the process.

1. Define the issue or the question on a whiteboard or flip chart. For example: "What ideas do you have to expedite our project?" Or "What is causing the quality issues in our software project?"
2. Ask participants for responses. Have the participants write their responses on sticky notes or index cards.
3. Collect and post ideas.
4. Sort the ideas into columns or clusters. Ask the participants to help you sort the ideas into common groups.
5. Define categories. Ask the participants to define category names or headings.
6. Discuss the Affinity Map. Ask participants for key observations. Ask probing questions to help everyone better understand the results.

When you complete the exercise, the team should have a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the issues. Sometimes the team may need additional help to identify the most significant items. Let’s look at another simple tool to prioritize the items.

1. Determine what to vote on.
2. Give the participants a number of votes. I give participants 5 sticky dots.
3. Give guidelines for voting. For example, participants may cast one or more votes for any one idea. Participants may cast all of their votes for one idea if they feel strongly enough about the idea.
4. Ask participants to cast votes. Participants cast their votes by putting their dots on the sticky notes.
5. Total votes. Count the dots and declare the top items.
6. Discuss the results. Are most of the votes in one category? What are the top 3-5 ideas?

The Affinity Map and Dot Voting provide a powerful one-two punch. You and your team will be able to sort and prioritize the ideas in a quick and organized manner. Give it a try!