Don't Waste Time: Write an Agenda

A great indicator of how valuable a meeting will be is the quality of the agenda that introduces the meeting. Plus, your client will not only appreciate, but also be impressed by your organization skills when you prepare a meeting agenda and provide it to her for review prior to your meeting.

The following post is an excerpt from Pro Web Project Management, published by Apress (2012).

My colleague, Justin Emond, and I wrote the book for both the full-time
project manager and the aspiring project manager who might have a role
that blends client support, web development, and project management.

Don't Waste Time: Write an Agenda

Meetings for small projects need to be efficient because your most scarce commodity is time to work on the project. In a larger project, however, you are likely to have more meetings involving more people simply because you have more stakeholders, a larger scope, and larger technical decisions to make. But meetings for larger projects -- while more frequent and perhaps longer -- need to be just as efficient, focused, and thoroughly planned as smaller project meetings.

With a larger meeting, your stakes are higher.

Too many meetings without clear resolution are a wasted effort because discussions end up being circular or branching off into unintended areas. In either case, the discussion never addresses the meeting goals, and the participants' time is wasted.

Meetings are expensive, and most people hate them. Most people hate meetings because most meetings are not productive and are run poorly. But meetings do not need to be hated. It is not hard to run a great meeting. However, it does require planning, an agenda, and clear goals.

Why Do I Need an Agenda?

The whole point of a meeting is simple: to make a decision that involves more than one person. This decision might be a set of features, a schedule, an upgrade plan, or a technical outline to solve a problem. Whatever you might need from the meeting, it is still a decision.
Where does the agenda come in?
In order for a meeting to come to a decision, you need to have a clear goal. Why?

• A goal makes it clear to all involved what needs to be determined by the end of the meeting.
• A goal enables all participants to evaluate the success of the meet-ing.
• Most importantly, the goal leads to a decision.

So what does the agenda do? The agenda makes the goal clear (by stating it succinctly in the agenda) and it sets a framework for writing the discussion topics so that they help attain the ultimate goal of the meeting: the decision.

The Agenda Clothing Rule

There is no set format for an agenda and no hard-and-fast template that you can apply to every kind of meeting. An agenda can be a simple three-item list sent to the team in an e-mail, or a full and formal two-page agenda as a PDF attachment in an e-mail sent to a client.

The trick to selecting an agenda format is the agenda clothing rule: the format of the agenda should match the attire of the meeting attendees.

If you are meeting with clients who are wearing pressed pants and ties, you need a nicely formatted, formal agenda. If you are meeting with a development team wearing flip-flops and wrinkled t-shirts with trite, trendy statements, a simple e-mailed agenda will probably do just fine.

The short agenda -- for the informal meeting -- is usually written as part of a meeting reminder e mail and contains a one-line goal for the meeting and a short list of two to five discussion items. It is short, sweet, targeted, and informal.

The long agenda -- for the more formal meeting -- is usually a full-page PDF that contains a few parts:

• Document title;
• Meeting location;
• Meeting date and time;
• Meeting goal(s);
• Topics/discussion items; and,
• List of participants with titles and affiliations.

If the more formal meeting is meant to be more than an hour, you probably want to include times for each discussion topic. This helps you end circular discussions for items that are not making progress toward a decision in order to "respect everyone's time and move on to the next item."

If you had listed 30 minutes for the current topic and time is clearly up, it becomes easier to say, "I want to respect everyone's time, so I think we really need to move to the next topic," without offending anyone.

A long agenda should probably end with a "next steps" topic to allow the person running the meeting to wrap up and outline what happens now.

Topics, Topics, Topics

The core of any agenda is the discussion topics you outline. These should be easy to write if you have identified a goal for the meeting.

Here are a few points to keep in mind:

• Items should be very short -- usually less than seven words (the thought process that goes into watering down a complex issue to just a few words tends to make clear the core issue that should be discussed);
• Be as specific as possible in each topic (the more vague the topic, the more vague and unhelpful the discussion will be); an,
• Ensure that each topic helps achieve whatever goal you have out-lined for the meeting.

One trick to determining what topics are achievable in the meeting is to take a moment and think about all of the immediate decisions you need to make for the project to continue. Think through the major work tasks you plan to assign to various members of your team, the next major project phase (and what you need to get there), and what work product you might be expected to create soon.

Once the topics are in place, it should be clear who needs to attend to the meeting. If possible, try to pick the minimum number of people who might need to attend, as duplicate decision coverage from key stakeholders tends to be inefficient.

Let the necessity of the project guide you to good meeting topics.

Putting so much thought into an agenda might seem like overkill. But remember, a meeting is a lot like what you eat: what you get out of a meeting can only be as good as what you put in.