The Project Meeting Facilitator: Facilitation Skills to Make the Most of Project Meetings

Have you ever been involved in a project that didn’t require a meeting? Neither have we. Well-run project meetings allow teams to get through the maze of distractions and obstacles to achieve results. Unfortunately, many project meetings aren’t well-run—they are viewed, by team members, as unproductive, tedious, wastes of precious time. But you can change that. The Project Meeting Facilitator contains practical techniques and practices that will help you facilitate your meetings more effectively, transforming them into well-planned, well-managed journeys that engage the team while achieving the intended goals.

About the Authors

Tammy Adams,B.S.,CPF,CQM, is managing partner of Chaosity LLC, which specializes in project facilitation and business process analysis. Her focus is on helping organizations simplify the chaos that exists in their business by clarifying and improving how they do what they do. Using collaborative techniques, she transforms team knowledge and experience into quality project deliverables. She is a certified professional facilitator and certified quality manager, with extensive experience in project management, operations, consulting, training, and facilitation.

Ms. Adams is a member of the editorial board of the BPM Institute and a board member for the International Association of Facilitators. She has authored several articles published in Cutter IT Journal, The Facilitator, and BPM Institute's online magazine. She is coauthor of the book Facilitating the Project Lifecycle and a regular speaker at international facilitator, quality, business process, and project management conferences.

Jan Means, M.S., CPF, is a principal consultant at Resource Advantage, Inc., a consulting and training firm specializing in business process innovation, organization productivity improvement, and information technology planning and design. Her experience as a senior manager, facilitator, and information systems manager and developer spans a twenty-seven-year career in a variety of industries including manufacturing, direct mail, financial services, and utilities. Her special expertise focuses on facilitation of customized work sessions, which bring business professionals together with information technology, project, and quality professionals to improve business performance. As a certified user of several psychological testing instruments, Ms. Means also works with organizations to help them understand the impact of employee preferences, behavior, and learned skills on accomplishing change and improving productivity.

She is the author of several articles about business process design and the human dynamics of change and is coauthor of the book Facilitating the Project Lifecycle: Skills and Tools to Accelerate Progress for Project Managers, Facilitators and Six Sigma Project Teams, published by Jossey-Bass in 2005. She is a regular speaker at international facilitator, quality, and project management conferences.

Michael S. Spivey, M.A., CPF, PMP, is a senior consultant and facilitator at Resource Advantage, Inc. Working as an operations manager, project manager, facilitator, and consultant over a twenty-year career in the financial services industry, he has a wide range of experience, from frontline management to managing enterprise-wide change initiatives. Mr. Spivey's special expertise focuses on project and program management, as well as the facilitation of work sessions that bring business and technical resources together to focus on improving overall business performance. This is accomplished through the numerous practical techniques that he models during joint business and technical work sessions. As a facilitator, he also works with organizations to transfer the knowledge of these techniques to practitioners so that they can be applied to both current and future project work.

Mr. Spivey holds a master of arts degree in human resource development from the George Washington University. He is a board member for the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), serving in the role of Professional Development Strategic Initiative coordinator. He is a certified professional facilitator (CPF), a certified assessor with the International Association of Facilitators, and a certified project management professional (PMP) with the Project Management Institute. Also, he holds Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) certification and uses the MBTI and its principles regularly with his clients. He is a regular speaker at international facilitator, quality, and project management conferences.