With large groups and a lot of time pressure you don't always spend enough effort in communicating the overall perspective of the project. Too bad, because emphasizing the "bigger picture" helps stakeholders to keep in line and, if done properly, enhance motivation among the team (they wanna be part of something cool). Here are two tips to save you time and help you out in this department.
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Today I got an email from Ken Thompson about his SwarmTeam project. I have talked to the guy earlier this year, and his story is amazing.

You really have to check it out… and imagine your project swarm team

One of the biggest challenges facing those who promote media, brands, communities or causes is how to meaningfully engage with mobile online groups in a way which, instead of turning them off, turns them into ambassadors and champions. Thats where Swarmteams comes in - the Community Engagement Tool inspired by nature.

Check out the 4-minute video which outlines the 7 simple steps for engagement marketing using Swarmteams.

I really hated this management mantra. I thought it was boring, because it turned the cool Project Manager into an accountant. I thought it was naive, as management is a black art. I was convinced it could not be done, you cannot measure everything. Yeah I know by now I was utterly wrong.

Problem number one within projects is communication. The unclear exchange of information. And this "measuring thing" is exactly a tool that can contribute to solving at least part of the problems.

Photography by Corrieb.

The god-father of this mantra must be Tom Gilb. He is screaming to measure things within software management for decades. The eye opener for me personally, was his emphasis on the use of metrics, expressing e.g. requirements using a scale with a range associated to it. You are not going to use it just to measure and if the subject has the wrong value hit the guy who created it on the head. When I first started out, this was really my impression of how these metrics would be used.

Instead, the use of metrics can be used to manage expectations, to help formulated key users their requirements, and to facilitate decision making. Gilb created a structure, Planguage, to express the requirements to process and product in. Every element has a metric associated with it; you define what the scale is, how you are going to measure it, what the past, current and desired values within the metric are.

Tom's son, Kai, has taken this approach towards Project Management, and has written a document about the use of Planguage in his EVO project management method. There is no real shortcut in getting the real power of its use, so I recommend to read the entire manuscript during the weekend or during the evenings of your next business trip. If you just have to get a real fast introduction you can read Kai's paper Agile. Now What?