Harvard Business Essentials Managing Projects Large and Small: The Fundamental Skills for Delivering on Budget and on Time

APPENDIX B

A Guide to Effective Meetings

Meetings are a fact of life in most organizational work, and equally so with projects. Because they are so frequent and so important, it’s in the project’s interests to make those meetings as effective as possible. You can conduct effective meetings if you pay attention to these key aspects of meetings: preparation, the meeting process itself, and follow-up. This guide is adapted from Harvard ManageMentor, an online product of Harvard Business School Publishing.

Be Prepared

You’ve undoubtedly attended meetings for which there was little or no preparation. Did those meetings accomplish anything? Probably not. In some cases, the purpose of the meeting was unclear from the beginning. In others, one or more ...