Basic Steps to Setup a Formal Meeting

Conducting meetings is an essential function of a Business Analyst’s job profile. These meetings usually involve large groups of people from different teams at different locations and often unknown to the Business Analyst. Getting such a group together and sharing/extracting relevant information is an achievement if done in the right way but can lead to embarrassment if done incorrectly. Here are some tips from my personal experience that would help you setup a good meeting. Please note that I would be covering only meeting setup and would be leaving out the ‘during’ the meeting and post meeting steps for some other time.


1. Invitees
For a meeting that involves multiple groups it is important that all the groups have the right representation. It is important to invite the right players/stakeholders for a meeting. It would be a good idea to prepare a group wise list for all attendees and review it with somebody who is familiar with all the groups before sending the invite. That ways, situations like business people invited to a IT meeting and vice versa can be avoided.

2. Subject
The subject should be concise but should be informative enough to indicate the purpose of the meeting. It is a good idea to mention the project and the action item of the meeting in the subject for example Retail Warehouse enhancement Project – FSD Review or Retail Warehouse project – Weekly team meeting etc. This will give a clear idea to the recipient if it is a relevant meeting for him or decide on the priority in case he has any conflicts.

3. Time and Location

Time and location are very crucial for any meeting more so in case of a large group. It is advised to send across the meeting invite at least 2 to 3 weeks in advance if it involves a large group. Once you have the list of attendees, make sure the meeting room that you reserve is big enough to accommodate everyone. It’s a good idea to put all the required attendees in ‘To’ field of the outlook meeting request and determine the meeting time based on the maximum available slots at a particular time. This would help avoid conflicts with other meetings and increase the attendance. Also the time slot for the meeting should be enough to cover the agenda of the meeting. It should neither be too long or too short.

4. Agenda
In the meeting invite the agenda of the meeting should be mentioned, so that the invitees have a clear idea on what all would be covered. It is recommended to breakdown the agenda into small bullet points which are easy to track.

5. Dial-in details
It is highly recommended to have dial in details for the people who cannot be physically present at the meeting.

6. Documents/Visual Aids
In case you would be using any documentation or presentation, either soft copies as attachments or links to them in case they are accessible at a shared location should be provided. It would be great if you can arrange a projector for your presentations but if that’s not possible you should have sufficient number of copies available with you at the start of the meeting.