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Effective meetings: discussing project updates

Project management — a B2 English lesson. Practise using modal verbs for advice and expand your vocabulary for discussing daily stand-up meetings.

Effective meetings: discussing project updates

Summary

This ESL lesson for B2 English students explores Project management meetings. Using a real video as the basis for discussion, students develop reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar skills across a 90-minute class.

The grammar focus is Modal verbs for advice, possibility, and necessity (can, should, may, need to). Key vocabulary includes methodology (noun), facilitator (noun), blockers (noun) and more, all drawn directly from the source material. The practical English section gives students useful phrases for real-life situations: You are in a daily stand-up meeting. You need to give your update, report a problem, and respond to others..

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Activities

00:00 Whether you work in a formal methodology of Scrum, in another form of agile project, or indeed a predictive plan project management approach, the idea of the morning standup or the daily standup is something you can benefit from.
00:19 So in this video I want to look at how to hold a daily stand-up meeting.
00:32 Daily stand-up meetings are short. For a small Scrum team of no more than half a dozen or so people, it's typically 15 minutes. But the essence is on keeping it short and sharp. 15 minutes is good.
00:48 And we stand up to stop us relaxing and taking our time over it. What's important is pace and energy, making sure everyone concentrates throughout the short meeting and contributes fully.
01:02 There are two styles of daily stand-up meeting that are commonly used. These are the round robin, often associated with the three questions, and the working the board or walking the board approach.
01:22 Let's start with the round robin. In a round-robin daily stand-up, the facilitator of the stand-up will go around the room, working through each member of the team and asking them a set number of questions and getting their responses.
01:42 And the common set of questions, often referred to as the three questions, are these: Question one, what did you achieve yesterday?
01:54 Second, what will you be working on? What will you be aiming to achieve today?
02:00 And third, what are the blockers that you'll be facing today? The impediments to your progress.
02:07 This is a chance for the team member to identify problems and to look for help from the team. This may be a little bit of general advice from the team in the meeting, or it may be a specific offer of help, or maybe a request made for help for an individual team member.
02:28 Team members should keep their answers short, precise and businesslike.
02:32 The walking the board approach starts with a Kanban board. It starts with work in progress and moves from the right to the left.
02:43 For each task, the facilitator will identify who owns it and ask how progress is going. In particular, they'll focus on the blockers or impediments to making progress, and then open up the discussion about the support that the group can give to unblock progress.
03:05 In both styles of daily stand-up, the team is expected to flag any conversation which is off-topic to bring it to a halt.
03:15 If that conversation is valuable, if it's going into a topic in depth, then individual team members can schedule time after the stand-up to go into that topic in the level of detail they need to.
03:32 And finally, in the spirit of agile approaches to project management, you should have an agile approach to your daily stand-up meeting. Constantly review how effective it is and look for ways to refine and improve the process of the meeting.
03:48 And as new members join the team, as other members leave the team, you may find that you need to shift the way you facilitate the meeting to get the best out of the individuals who are present.
04:02 I have never worked on an agile project, but I have worked on many projects that follow predictive planned project management approaches.
09 On many of those I have been part of or facilitated daily stand-up meetings. It is not an artifact solely of the agile paradigm. It's a technique that you can use on your projects to better control the project and to allow everybody to work as effectively as possible.
04:34 Please do give this video a thumbs-up if you've enjoyed it. I'll be creating loads more great project management content, so please do subscribe to the channel and hit the bell so you don't miss any of that content. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.

Vocabulary focus

The vocabulary section introduces B2-level words and phrases related to Project management meetings. Key terms include methodology (noun), facilitator (noun), blockers (noun), impediments (noun), agile (adjective). Students practise using these terms in context through exercises drawn from the source material.

Grammar focus

This lesson focuses on Modal verbs for advice, possibility, and necessity (can, should, may, need to). In professional English, we use modal verbs to express different levels of certainty, obligation, and suggestion. 'Can' is often used to talk about ability or possibility ('You can benefit from this').

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How to hold a daily stand-up meeting
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