The 7 Ps – Game Storming: optimize your meetings

Take your meetings to the next level and boost their efficiency by preparing with the 7 Ps tool.

Using the 7Ps to prep for your meetings has many benefits:

• They boost collective intelligence.
• Stimulate engagement.
• Give fuel to the engines of agility.
• Anchor responsibility.

What are the objectives do the 7Ps seek to achieve?

Preparing the 7Ps before a meeting, brainstorming session, conference or a workshop is very useful in many areas, but particularly in the management of web, mobile and software projects.

Articulating the 7Ps will allow you to:

• Validate the relevance of the meeting as well as the themes to be discussed.
• Effectively involve the participants in the meeting, notably thanks to the Preparation phase (the 6th P).
• Be able to react as efficiently as possible in the event of unforeseen events or obstacles that may arise during the meeting.
• Have a global view of all the meeting’s elements, and therefore to be able to focus on the essential.

What are the 7P Game-Storming tools?

Let’s take a closer look at the meaning of the 7Ps:

1. Purpose (objective): what will the meeting be used for? what is the purpose of the meeting?
2. Product (product): depending on the objective, what actions will be taken to actualize the objective at the end of the meeting?
3. Participants: who are the participants? who do you need in order to achieve the goal(s)?
4. Process: what points will be discussed during the meeting?
5. Pitfalls (risks / pitfalls): what could go wrong during the meeting? and what do you have planned to counter or resolve these potential challenges?
6. Preparation: What will you ask participants to prepare before the meeting so that the meeting is as efficient as possible?
7. Practical: this concerns logistics, room reservation, scheduling of the meeting via a videoconference tool, access to the online meeting, access to the room, equipment (overhead projector, etc.)

Concrete example of the use of 7Ps as part of the launch of a blog on an e-commerce website

Context: you are an e-merchant who sells winter shoes online. To attract more traffic to your website and increase your sales, you want to set up a blog on your site, which currently doesn’t have one.

Let’s go over the 7 Ps that should be prepared before the meeting.

1. Purpose (objective): precisely define the objective that your meeting needs to reach. Your objective is: to create and launch the blog of your e-commerce site.

2. Product: during the meeting, each participant will be assigned a list of tasks that they will have to implement in order to set up the blog on the website.

3. Participants: the meetings’ invitees should be the people who will be able to help you achieve the objective: your webmaster, your developers, your project manager, etc.

4. Process: list all the points related to your objective that you want to discuss with the participants, such as:

• When do you want the blog to go live?
• What will the blog categories be?
• Who is in charge of designing the user journey as well as the graphic charter of the blog?
• Who will oversee the implementation of natural referencing?
• Etc.

5. Pitfalls (risks / pitfalls): what obstacles or challenges might be encountered during the meeting? Do you think your team is already too busy to handle the launch of your blog? In that case, think about the alternatives you can offer them:

• You can outsource the development of the blog.
• You might be able change the priority of the projects they are currently working on.
• You can recruit someone new to strengthen the team.

 6. Preparation: ask each of the participants, according to their given specialty, to think about the actions they will need to take in order to set up and launch the blog.

7. Practical: schedule a virtual meeting via Zoom, and send the link to the participants 1 week before the meeting, with a reminder 1 day before it’s scheduled to take place.

Discover all our articles focused on improving digital projects in the “Methods” section of our blog.