12:00 P.M. onward – stakeholder time

Monday afternoon is a great time to catch up with your key stakeholders. During this time, you should be checking in with them to see whether their priorities and focus have changed. More importantly, you need to use this time to understand their expectations for the project this week and, if required, re-set their expectations realistically too. You can think of this stage almost like a weekly news program.

Getting involved with your key stakeholders is something that will help you and your team to plan. For example, you may find out that there is a major incident with another IT system, or that there's an emergency project required to deal with a regulatory change, which must take priority over all the existing projects.

Alternatively, the idea of stakeholder time could be something quite simple, like your project sponsor expecting to see the product ready to ship by the end of this week!