Before 2008 ended, I wanted to have a planning session with my two teams, separately of course. I had two plans: (1) to hold a separate chat conference or (2) to e-mail each team member and consolidate their feedback.

I went for the latter. The last day of work last year, I emailed them and told them that they wouldn’t have a quota for that day, no tasks but to perform a virtual planning session.

Here’s the guide I emailed them:

Procedure:
1. Do not work on your usual task today. So no daily quota to accomplish.

2. Come up with 10 ideas, suggestions, recommendation as to how we can improve our website.

3. These ideas, suggestions, recommendations may be about:
a. design of the site
b. content
c. usability
d. others, please specify

4. With your suggestions/recommendations, include a link/url of your reference website or of the link/url of our site.
For example: http://www.xxx.com/events/?location=manila
Why is there only one event listed under Manila? Is this true?
OR
we have a Lanzones Festival of Camiguin but it doesn’t show up here: http://www.xxx.com/events/?location=camiguin

5. What tip can you give your teammate?
a. to the researcher
b. to the programmer
c. to the web marketer

The outcome is overwhelming! You get a mountain of information that you don’t get if you’re chatting, or that you’ve overlooked as a project manager. To me by emailing them, I gave them the chance to really evaluate the websites and thus, they were able to come up with excellent ideas, observation, and recommendations.

If you’re a project manager, I suggest you do this.

Tags: planning session, project management, virtual planning

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under Documentation, Planning, project management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.