Project Sponsor Pre-Meeting Checklist
Project Sponsor Pre-Meeting Checklist
By Zenkara
It’s always a good idea to come prepared to meetings with project sponsors – particularly if you’ve got bad news. The important thing is to spring no surprises.
- What is the objective of the meeting?
- What outcome do you want? Agreement, consensus, awareness?
- What percentage of the project has been achieved versus planned?
- What are the top 4 points you want to get across during the update?
- What is worrying the sponsor right now? (if you don’t know this, you better find out ASAP)
- What are you doing about their concerns? What have you done about it? (simply saying “in the process of …” or “we’re looking at it…” is a really poor explanation)
- What is going well on the project? – always start the meeting with some good news and end the meeting with some good news
- What is a problem right now? Technical, money, people, politics, suppliers
- What can be done?
- What do you need the sponsor to do? – be specific
- Be prepared with the KPIs and drill down where needed
- What risks are not in control? Why not?
- How are communications with the customers/end-users going?
- How’s the team going? Burnt out? Fragmented?
- What or who needs changing in the team?
- What was the sponsor’s original expectations? Have these changed? Who do you know?
- Has the customer’s expectations changed? Are they realistic?
- Is the customer ready for the next stage of the project?
To Do
- Take schedule, budget, progress reports to the meeting
- Ensure that you get up to date info from each team leader, member – since sometimes progress reports are out of date
- Bring along deliverables list showing progress (if not included in the schedule)
Zenkara focuses on streamlining and deploying business processes and quality systems and accelerating decision making through OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and metrics systems. Zenkara is located in Brisbane, Australia.
