Preparing for the team meeting
Read Part I of our story for the background information.
Alice needs to prepare for the initial team meeting, which will be held in 2 weeks. The meeting will be in the NYC office and will be two and a half days in length. Everyone is arriving on Monday evening at 5 PM.
Prior to the meeting, Alice sent out a survey to each team member to have them answer questions about themselves so that she could use it in an activity. This included questions such as where they were born, whether they were married and how many children they had, sports they liked to play, etc. The goal of the “Getting to Know You” activity – to be introduced on Monday evening – was to have the team members talk with each other and get the answers to the questions asked. For example, Ali, though located in Saudi Arabia, was born in London. The question on the survey asked: “Who was born in London?”
A number of other activities – designed for the team members to begin to get to know each other and learn about each other on a personal level – were planned for throughout the two and a half days.
Alice has decided the high level overview agenda will be as follows:
| Date |
Description |
|
Monday evening |
Cocktails/networking and dinner (socializing) Introduce activity – “Getting to Know You” |
|
Tuesday |
|
|
Tuesday evening |
Team dinner with sponsor Time to socialize and continue to build relationships among team members (and work on “Getting to Know You” activity) |
|
Wednesday |
|
Alice has a number of goals for this initial team meeting. They included:
- Enabling for the team to socialize and get to know each other on a personal basis through time to just talk with each other and through to a variety of team building activities
- Enabling for the team to learn about the project from the sponsor so they could understand the vision and how the project was aligned to the strategy of the organization
- Having the team develop processes and procedures for how they will work together and solve conflict and resolve problems that may arise
- Having the team develop the schedule and other project components such as overall communications with stakeholders, risk identification and planning, how changes will be managed, etc.
This meeting was especially important because Alice was not sure she would be able to get the team together again in one location given tight the cost involved in bringing them all on site.
Part III: The first team meeting
