Follow up
Most major presentations and meetings of any complexity will require follow-up work and responses. The quality of this work is just as important as the presentation, in reaching your final business objectives. It would be rather tragic to not achieve your goals because of inadequate follow up after exerting such an effort on the presentation itself. Below are a few of our key follow-up activities. As a team, we generally discuss these before a presentation.
Next day courtesies
Our plan was to have a key person call the managers who attended the presentation, and to also have our project manager call their project manager the next business day. These were to be short courtesy calls to thank them for their time and effort and respond to any immediate action items.
Follow up on action items
Upon our return, we emailed all attendees a copy of the action items. We also gathered our team and made sure that everyone understood the path forward and their role. We used our scheduling software to create a plan of the next phase and circulated it. We also promptly scheduled follow-up meetings with the client in line with the plan.
Update requirements
With projects of complexity and maturity, it isn't uncommon to exit meetings with several clarifications to requirements. We had several, and immediately used our change management process to formally capture them. This is important in maintaining control of the project, for scope management, and for contract management.
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Except gleaned from:
"Reprinted with permission from Dr. Alan Zimmerman's 'Tuesday Tip.' As a
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