So now we're on to the implement stage. Now you may have noticed that as we've been going through this program, it seems to be taking an awful long time, before we actually do anything. We've done all that work, identify why want to change the current state analysis, it's a five why's a fishbone diagram to do some root cause, with lots of planning, we've done some brainstorming, we've created a Gantt chart. We've not done anything yet. And this is one of the real challenges for you, if you're going to do an improvement is that it feels like there's a lot of work to do up front. So what most people do is they just get cracking.

Just want to start doing what they think is the improvement. But as we've already mentioned, this work up front is going to make the implementation so much easier. There's really worth doing that preparation work is something that I constantly have to battle with, with the teams that I work with. Do that work up front. It makes difference. When you come to implement, then you're really just implementing the plan that you've identified.

So when it comes to implementing you've made life easy for yourself really, because you've planned it well, if planned in, how are you going to monitor? How are you going to check it, what control mechanisms you're going to use, and you've planned that so everybody knows what's happening, then you're able to just execute the plan. You're planning what you're going to do. So just do it. Monitor course, monitor what's happening, use your Gantt charts and monitor, make sure that the phases are where they need to be. And if they're starting to slip, then make some adjustments, and better to know that better to act sooner rather than later.

Other tools, you might use things like meetings, dashboards and reports. So we're going to talk about meetings in a bit more detail in a moment. In terms of dashboards and reports. Basically, these are just our bespoke ways of managing your particular project. So a dashboard is really when you decide what are the key performance indicators for this project, what are the things we need to be seeing at various stages within this project. And then you're obviously looking at your dashboard, which is a set of measures, essentially, to see whether those things are happening.

They have to be careful with dashboards, because sometimes, initially, you might have a period where performance decreases. So you should be anticipating that. So your dashboard might start to indicate that actually change overs gone up, or your machine efficiencies decreased while you're doing this, change over project and that's because of the activity that you're doing through the project. So your dashboard needs to be sophisticated enough to show you what's happening. And you need to be a suppose for Warner forearm to know what likely to be happening. So your dashboard is really just a set of KPIs that tell you where you should be up to.

With your report. I'm not going to go into lots of detail with that. If you want to know more about how to create your own dashboard, then by all means get in touch with me. And we can talk about that. They tend to be something that that businesses want to do themselves and for their own benefit. Report.

Similarly, really, you can do reports in lots of ways. A report could be anything from a weekly email that says, this is where up to, this is what I've done. This is what progress I've made. These are my issues, to a more sophisticated report, which uses red, Amber and green colors to indicate whether you are behind on this particular task, whether you're on target or whether you have completed it. So, again, there's lots of different ways of doing this. The important thing to make sure is that whatever report process, you have that You understand it, and that those people who are providing you with reports and reading them, also understand them.

So everybody has the same information in the right away. Again, if you want more information about that, more than happy for you to contact me about how to create this. What I would like to talk more about is meetings. So meetings, obviously is a wider subject. And this stuff we're going to talk about now applies to all sorts of meetings, really, it's a program actually deliver and or businesses in management development courses, and so on. But I thought it'd be useful to talk about it in this context, because a lot of the ways that you monitor and control your project will be through having project meetings, and often meetings I go to, and sometimes they're a bit depressing really and hard work.

There seems to be not very much going on and at the end of it, we're not quite sure whether we've, we've really done anything through that means It's all just been a bit going through the motions. So why don't you just include elements of of how to make sure your project meetings really deliver. If you do meetings Other times, then then this is good stuff, too. So there's 10, meeting mus 10 things to get right if you're going to deliver effective meetings. Some of this, of course, mirrors the simple improvement process. So you'll see the the same logic applying to our 10 meeting must, because the first thing we want to talk about is why why are we having the meeting?

Now with a project meeting that might seem pretty obvious, but it's worth just being really clear about why you want a weekly project meeting? Is it to get an update on where everybody is? Is it to identify issues, identify actions that need to be written down and then carried out by specific people following that meeting. They those all sound like good reasons to have a meeting. Tonight, if those other reasons, write them down, make it really clear what the meetings for. And that will determine whether you've had a good one or not.

Whether you achieve those things get even more detailed and actually have some smart goals or a SMART goal for your meeting. I'm actually a big fan of when you send a meeting invitation, whether it be a project meeting or any other of putting a SMART goal on the meeting invitation. So by the time we finish this meeting, we will have whatever that meeting is supposed to achieve. So that really makes it clear why people are being invited and what the meetings for as people are leaving that meeting going out the door. You should never hear people say, Well, I don't know what that was all about what a waste of time. If that's happening.

Your meetings are not smart. Again, I think that's another big area of wasted lots of businesses where people get together, have a meeting for an hour, perhaps 10 people 10 times All their hourly salaries can add up to hundreds of pounds, even thousands depending on how well they're paid. So it's a big investment. So make sure that your meetings are smart, you've got a clear reason why, and that you know exactly what you want to achieve through the meeting. Have an agenda, the agenda becomes the map or roadmap for your meeting. So if you think about a journey, your reason why is why you want to travel to London.

What is it? What's the purpose of your journey? You SMART goal is where you going by when that's your specific way you're going by word. And your agenda is how you're going to get there. So what's the journey going to be? So in order for us to achieve our meeting SMART goals, we're going to need to cover this piece of information, but it's going to get some feedback from such and such we need to do a brainstorming session.

We'll do a fishbone for this and we'll do that So you're really clear about what you're going to do during that meeting. Next thing to make sure you get right is get the right people there. Who are the right people? the right people are the people that can help you achieve the SMART goal for the meeting. Whatever the SMART goal is, who do you need to get that? Those are the right people?

Organize it, of course, make sure that everybody knows what it is. It's great if you can keep it at a regular time if it's a project meeting. So we know that we have a budget meeting every Thursday afternoon. That's what we do. We always do that just creates a habit and it's a lot easier. It's not always possible to do that.

Just make sure you organize it and let people know of course, especially if it changes. The next couple are about assertiveness really and of course this course today isn't about assertiveness, so we're going to have to skip over that a little bit. But essentially what we mean by assertiveness is that It's about adult to adult conversation. So the chairperson, perhaps you if it's your project, you are communicating in an adult way. And you're encouraging your attendees, the people who are doing the project with you to respond in an adult way. So giving people in absolute roasting, because they haven't achieved their deadline for their project tasks, is probably not the best way to get your project to deliver.

So it could be a serious conversation. It may have serious consequences, but you still maintain an adult to adult way of communicating. Of course, review the meeting. Now, you might review as you go through the meeting, as you go through the agenda points. At the end of the first agenda point, you might say, Okay, so that's the end of our agenda, point one. We've agreed then that let's move on to point two, and so on.

And then of course, you do everything At the end, we also need to make sure that we define and assign actions. So some meetings, I guess, don't require actions, but there's not many, I can't think of many meetings where actions shouldn't be identified. And if it's just a communication meeting to say, you know, we're moving offices or something like that. And yeah, I can see that you might have a meeting without actions. But normally, there are actions that come from a meeting, and particularly in a project meeting. So the actions would involve somebody doing something in line with the issues that have been raised.

So somebody come up with a problem, something that's getting in the way, there needs to be actions against that problem or issue that somebody's going to take ownership for. So name, and by When are they going to achieve it or carry it out? that then gets reported on the next project meeting. So we know what's happening. Whether the person has been able to action, that particular thing. Now, of course, you're probably defining and assigning actions as you go.

But at the end, you'd review those to make sure that everybody agrees. And everybody knows, just as a bit of an aside, some people when they hold meetings, assign actions to people who are not there. And sometimes that's done as a kind of punishment, because they should have turned up at the meeting. So if you don't turn up, get all the actions. And I would advise against that. It's actually a bad practice.

So if you're not at the meeting, you can't really accept an action. So what happens is, if the person who really needs to have that action, isn't there, somebody in the meeting has to take that action and the action would be probably to go and action somebody else, but they would be the person responsible for it at the next meeting. So they would report on it and explain what happened. It's just a way of making sure that accountabilities really there through the meeting. So record the meeting these days, we tend not to have lengthy minutes of meetings. But certainly we want the main points and the actions, including perhaps the issues in the first place.

So issues, actions, who's going to deal with them, and by when so very simple. So this is just an action board. It's a sort of thing that you might use in what's called a salary review, a different type of meeting, but you could use this in a project meeting too. And basically, it's just, you know, what has been done or what needs to be done, who's going to do it, by way. So we've got a set of actions there that's come out from that meeting. So somebody needs to brief out the plan, somebody needs to check the power supplies when we before we do the move.

So many. So look, after clearing the area, somebody needs to perform a stress test on such and such. So who's going to do that and by way, those things will probably be covered in your Gantt chart anyway. But these are often forgotten. that come in, in addition to that, so things that you haven't assumed, or hadn't been able to anticipate, or even issues that have occurred that you're going to need to sort out. So you might have an actual board, but certainly record it so that you know, who's responsible.

And then of course, at the next meeting, you can then ask people where they're up to with those actions. Okay, so where are we up to? So we're up to implement, we've just finished that we've looked at using Gantt charts to plan our project. And then, of course, using the Gantt chart then to check against current progress. So the Gantt chart then becomes a monitoring tool, and meetings as a way to keep on top of what's happening. And effective meetings, you've got those 10 must haves for an effective meeting.

You might use a dashboard to keep a track of your project KPIs, the things that you need to be looking for the numbers you need to be looking at. And, of course, a report might A weekly report ranges from a simple email to something a bit more sophisticated. These things tend to be designed for specifically what you need. So again, just going back to our quick case study, which was changeover reduction at a printing plant. So they actually created a project hub, which was a folder on their shared drive, which in which was kept all of the information that they needed. So they thought that was a good idea.

So we helped them with that. And the Gantt chart, we helped them put that together. And we monitored that ourselves, obviously, we were responsible for helping supporting coaching them, we needed to do some regular coaching visits. So for us, that was useful to keep on top of what was happening. If this is your project within your business, then essentially you need to be operating as a as a coach if you're not doing all of the activities, as well as managing the project. So you might be talking to the teams and ask me how they're getting on.

Helping them to overcome any difficulties. We did some updates kept them informed and we kept kept informed. And we had email reports come to us on a fairly regular basis. So that was that was what we did with that particular project.