Meeting Management: IPAD
In my earlier post on meeting management I wrote on how to
keep meetings shorter and frequent to get the most out of meetings. Shorter meetings bring a sense of
urgency. Remember people will work their
butts off to ship a product on time. In
this post I want to talk on other aspects of how to get the most out of a meeting. There are many issues related to it but I
will just focus on three of them and they are very simple to remember.
The principle is known as IPAD
principle. Ok. Very simple just remember IPAD. It is very simple. IPAD
means I will come to the meeting Prepared with an Agenda and leave with a Deliverable
(read outcome). These three
aspects of meeting (Preparation, Agenda, and Deliverable) are very important if you want to get something
productive out of a meeting. So what do
I stand for? It stands for
Responsibility. It means I will be held
responsible for not having these things done.
That is why I have written it as an Oath. I feel that if these aspects of business
meeting are not met then it is not business meeting, it is just a hangout.
Preparation
When someone comes to the meeting unprepared without having
any clue as to what is going on is such a frustrating experience. It wastes everyone’s time and energy. If everyone comes prepared to a meeting then
conducting a meeting goes effortless.
Sometimes you might even get solutions to problems even before you have
a meeting. Your team mate might even
email you the solution. Everyone
contributes to a higher level if they are prepared.
Agenda
Walking into a meeting without an Agenda is like wandering
in a Jungle where you don’t have a clue where are you going. Having a fixed agenda which has definite
outcomes at the end of the meeting is very important. A good agenda should have definite outcomes
also known as deliverables assigned to specific individuals. Sometimes meetings go on forever and they
seem to achieve nothing. Another thing
to include in an Agenda is a quick overview of last meetings deliverables being
met or not. If your team doesn’t have
agenda then volunteer to create one and send email to everyone requesting
inputs and review them. Send agenda in
advance.
Deliverable
As mentioned above Deliverable or outcome is a must after
you have conducted meeting. A deliverable
will give a to-do-list to your team to work on.
Each deliverable should be assigned to a team member with a deadline. Otherwise people would land up with sentence,
“Oh, nobody told me”, “I don’t know what we were supposed to do”. Be relentless in your approach to reach to a
definite outcome of a meeting.
