Regular meetings for consultants

[#1]

Introduction

Large-scale project planning and management should be done with a usage of specialized tools. But what if you work as a consultant? Sometimes you implement new processes, but usually you are trying to improve what somebody else has done before. The customers often don’t know exactly what they need, so it is very hard to plan all the projects and activities. Consultants are usually not dependent on each other, so they don’t need to communicate with each other much.

What makes sense in this situation is to be enriched by the experience of the teammates - how they’ve solved different situations and problems.

We were looking for a way to do regular meetings that will be:

• effective
• entertaining (if possible)
• short
• enriching

Our meetings

We meet once a week, on Monday in the morning. We call this meeting Team News. Each member of the team prepares for this meeting on Friday or more often on Monday just before the meeting. We create a new document in Confluence for each meeting.

Here's how the template looks like:

Quick overview of the projects

The team member responsible for the project informs the others about what is currently happening on the project

Achievements

Sometimes almost impossible things happen during the week. There is nothing better than motivating the team with successes.

Losses

Not everything can go right, it's good to know about the mistakes so we can learn from them and do better next time. It doesn’t do any good hiding something.

Unfinished tasks

It happens we don't get some key tasks done, sometimes we need help from the others or more time, but it is necessary to discuss how to handle the situation.

Key tasks for the upcoming week

Tasks we absolutely must finish this week.