It might not be immediately apparent, but probably the highest impact area of PMO is agenda-making. Having poor agendas makes you vulnerable to poor facilitation, leads to swirl, and can make taking notes significantly harder. Because effective agenda-writing is a skill and takes foresight, I don’t anticipate them being fully utilized, but nonetheless, as you’re trying to improve your project management skills, it’s important to build in structure through agendas to increase your leverage.
Having crappy agendas starts by affecting facilitation. If you haven’t planned out what the meeting is going to entail, you’re going to fail. Having a logical flow is important, because this provides the necessary context to decisions, and the level of detail to give to stakeholders. Understanding what your goals are before you start the meeting also helps you avoid mistakes like being very technical to stakeholders, or very general to SMEs. Taking the time before a meeting to validate your language with someone else, and sending them out in advance means that participants are better able to participate in the conversation because they can start thinking about what to say beforehand. Plus, if additional experts are needed, it’s easy to pull them in if there’s something clearly written down.
The other part of agenda writing that’s important is discrete questions. if you can break questions down into parts, give clear recommendations with reasoning attached, and clearly demarcate areas, you avoid vanilla swirl like you’re lactose intolerant. Taking the time to go through the thought process of how the meeting should go before a meeting happens gives you the discipline and focus to ensure you’re posing the right questions. After all, you determine what you’re trying to get out of the meeting before it happens.
This dovetails into note-taking. When you’ve got a clear, discrete agenda, you need to spend a lot less time anticipating what to talk about, and you can more clearly focus on documenting decisions. Since your flow is established, there’s less you need to write down, and presumably less to follow-up on since your meetings will be a lot more productive.
Agenda writing is probably one of the most important tools in a PM’s toolkit, but because agendas that are well-prepared are hyper-focused, the effort to revise often goes unnoticed. It’s that which is unseen that allows one to get ahead.
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