Meetings

Different organizations communicate in different ways. Where organizations are distributed, they will tend to rely on e-mail and teleconferencing facilities. Organizations that have more mature Service Management processes and tools will tend to rely on the tools and processes for communication (e.g. using an Incident Management tool to escalate and track incidents, instead of requesting e-mail or telephone calls for updates).

Other organizations prefer to communicate using meetings. However, it is important not to get into the mode whereby the only time work is done, or management is involved, is during a meeting. Also, face-to-face meetings tend to increase costs (e.g. travel, time spent in informal discussions, refreshments, etc.), so meeting organizers should balance the value of the meeting with the number and identity of the attendees and the time they will spend in, and getting to, the meeting.

The purpose of meetings is to communicate effectively to a group of people about a common set of objectives or activities. Meetings should be well controlled and brief, and the focus should be on facilitating action. A good rule is not to hold a meeting if the information can be communicated effectively by automated means.

A number of factors are essential for successful meetings. Although these may seem to be common sense, they are sometimes neglected:

• Establish and communicate a clear agenda to ensure that the meeting achieves its objective and to help the facilitator prevent attendees from ‘hi-jacking’ the meeting.
• Ensure that the rules for participating are understood. Organizations tend to have a formal set of meeting rules, ranging from relatively informal to very formal (e.g. Roberts Rules of Order).
• Make use of ‘parking lots’ or notes that record issues that are not directly relevant to the purpose of the meeting, but which can be called on if the need for discussion arises.
• Minutes of the meeting: rules should be set about when minutes are taken. Minutes are used to remind people who are assigned actions and to track the progress of delegated actions. They are also useful in ensuring that cross-functional decisions and actions are tracked and followed through.
• Use techniques to encourage the appropriate level of participation. One technique when discussing improvements, for example, is the ‘keep, stop, start’ technique. Participants are encouraged to list items that they would like to keep, things that need to be stopped and initiatives or actions that they would like to see started.

Examples of typical meetings are given below:

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 929