I hope, you’re really looking forward after the two examples, how the final meeting could go. In short: similar! The objective is, to end the project not only in its content but also emotionally. I think that a final social event should not be a CAN, but a MUST. It should be celebrated if you worked (hopefully) well together for a longer time, achieved your objectives and produced good results. It also serves the goodbyes, an important aspect of the ” Adjourning-Phase ” (= 5. Phase after B. W. Tuckman’s). An important point is the reflection of the content of the project, but again not only for those of the so-called “magic triangle”, but in addition, (see the following graph):

grafik projekt

These lessons should not only be put in writing, but on conclusion transported into the organisation/s to ideally avoid similar errors. A wonderful emotional conclusion, which however, in turn, requires a lot of preparatory work including a slide show. So you will have to really shoot each meeting and then put these images in a nice order, perhaps even with music. And – imagine – the project members of an EU project with 11 organisations, which I once coordinated, sang a song for me at the final party. When did they prepare this, with self-created lyrics no less – no idea! I was close to tears, and I think it was not only me, but also all other partners will not forget this evening. The highly official final conference where the results of the project, were prominently presented and discussed with 120 conference participants, was nothing in comparison! 🙂

So, that’s it! Now we briefly discussed all 3 major meetings in a project, be it national or international, be it internally or in conjunction with externals. You could write a lot more about this, but a blog is not a dissertation. 🙂

I hope I have encouraged you, to leave the roads well travelled and also think about more innovative methods in project meetings. There are so many! Your participants will thank you for this! I am happy to hear about your experiences and feedbacks. If you do not (yet) trust yourself or you simply want to focus on your other tasks as a project manager and want to actively join the discussion, then you can also hire external moderators. 🙂 You may also wanna check my offer about project management coaching, social skills  and PM methods and PM processes.

All the best meanwhile! Birgit