How do we review? When?
These questions should be answered up front between all team members. You should know when and how you will be reviewing your project deliverables before the project begins.
Communication is key no matter what the size of the project is.
When setting up a project schedule, consider breaking down the tasks into different milestones. This makes a large project more manageable and gives a sense of completion throughout the entire project, rather than just at the end. Each milestone should have a reachable deadline. Communicate with the leads responsible for getting the particular tasks done within each milestone. They can tell you how long it will take and when to set review dates.
Don’t forget to factor in holidays, vacations and other projects that may be going on internally. As you can see, all of the factors and # of people involved can make it impossible to get everyone in a meeting at the same time.
Once you have some preliminary dates setup, send them out to everyone involved in the team. If a team member could attend a meeting, but doesn’t necessarily need to be there, set them as optional on the meeting requests and make sure they know what the expectations are when sending. It’s helpful to alleviate the number of meetings on their schedule so they can get some work done too!
Who should be involved in reviewing?
The more people involved in the decision-making, the longer it will take for a project to move forward. If the project affects many different departments in your organization, make sure those particular department leads are involved on their specific areas. There is no need to waste their time by including them on all steps of the project. It drags out the project timeline and keeps them from getting other work done. Only involve the people who need to be involved. If you still end up having a large group, try and have more internal meetings before meeting with any external partners. This will save you money by cutting back on the meeting time with these partners/vendors.
Meeting expectations
Someone should be selected to run every meeting. They should have a brief list (at minimum) of all topics that need to be covered. There should also be an end goal to each meeting. It’s very easy for a meeting to get off topic, especially with a large number of people involved. Your meeting leader should be responsible for getting the meeting back on task and keeping track of time.
It’s common for external vendors to send meeting agendas out to make sure you understand what needs to be included in a particular meeting from their end.
Even if the meeting is a brief conference call between three team members, everyone on the call should have a general idea what is going to be covered and what they should have prepared for it to be effective.
Emailing a quick bulleted list out beforehand can make a pointless call an effective one.
Make sure when sending out meeting invites, to include a meeting agenda. Give the team members enough time before the meeting to prepare their materials or information. A common mistake is to send out an agenda the day of a meeting. Chances are your team also has other meetings and items to accomplish that day and won’t have a chance to properly prepare.
At the end of each meeting or conference call, it’s important that every person involved understand what his or her takeaways are. What tasks do they need to accomplish before the next meeting? Which people do they need to contact in order for the next steps of the project to go smoothly? By when should they accomplish said tasks? The meeting leader should quickly go around the room and make sure each team member knows what their next objectives are.
Working remotely
Nowadays, many designers, developers, writers, etc. work remotely with their clients. There are many different ways to communicate effectively when working with an external team.
Here are a few great solutions for holding virtual meetings:
GoToMeeting, WebEx, Adobe Connect, Fuze Meeting and InterCall.
Skype is also a great tool when working across the country or with team members overseas. You can easily video chat or make a phone call at no cost. Free is great when international calls can get expensive.
Online project managers
Not everyone has an exceptionally large budget to work with and can afford to hire a project manager. Another great second is to take advantage of an online project management system. Many web development companies and designers use them to help them communicate, stay on schedule and organize their projects when working remotely. They are also great to see where time is being spent, keeping track of outstanding invoices, and keeping in touch with all team members without clogging up email in-boxes.
Above is an example of the time spent on a project in a particular area. You can see the weeks where this area was heavily focused on and weeks it wasn’t. A project manager can analyze data like this to determine weak areas of the team or ways to pick-up the pace.
Next Chapter 4: Website Design Terminology
