Managing Project Status Meetings

To keep close track of progress on the project, the project manager needs information from his or her team on a timely basis. This information will be provided during a project status meeting. At a minimum, you need to have a status meeting at least once a week. On some of my major projects, daily status meetings were the norm for the first few weeks, and when the need for daily information wasn't as critical, I switched to twice a week and finally to weekly status meetings.

Who Should Attend Status Meetings?

To use the status meetings correctly and efficiently, it's important to figure out who should be in attendance. This information should be a part of your communication plan.

When choosing who should attend, keep the following points in mind:

• At first your status team may include only those team members who are needed in the planning phase. If the other team members don't need to know the information, don't make them come to a meeting and sit there without a good reason. You are going to distribute meeting minutes anyway, so the team members who aren't needed at the actual meeting will be informed about what transpired.
• There will be times in a status meeting when two team members get into a discussion and the other people in the meeting aren't needed. If this happens, ask them to conduct a sidebar meeting so that your own status meeting can continue. A sidebar meeting is one in which a limited number of people need to participate, and problems can resolved more effectively away from your status meeting. Having everyone in the room listen to these sidebar topics isn't useful.

When Are Status Meetings Held?

Usually, status meetings are held toward the end of the week. Just make sure it's the same day each week. People get used to preparing information for a status meeting if they know exactly when the meeting will occur.

What Is the Purpose of a Status Meeting?

You hold a status meeting to get information to the whole team. On large projects, the participants in the status meeting may be representatives of their department. You can't have all the people on a 250-person project team come into a meeting once a week, so make sure that someone is there to represent the rest of the people in their section. The purpose of the meeting is to encourage the free flow of information, and that means ensuring that the people who need to have information to do their jobs get the information at the status meeting. Remember once again that you are going to distribute minutes of the meeting later, so that will take care of the people who aren't in attendance.

What Is the Status Meeting Format?

Although the format of status review meetings should be flexible, as project needs dictate, certain items are part of every status meeting. I recommend that you proceed in the following top-down fashion:

1. The project champion reports any changes that may have a bearing on the future of the project.
2. The client reports any changes that may have a bearing on the future of the project.
3. The project manager reports on the overall health of the project and the impact of earlier problems, changes, and corrective actions at the project level.
4. Activity managers report on the health of activities open or scheduled open for work since the last status meeting.
5. Activity managers of future activities report on any changes since the last meeting that might impact project status.
6. The project manager reviews the status of open problems from the lat status meeting.
7. Attendees identify new problems and assign responsibility for their resolution (the only discussion allowed here is for clarification purposes).
8. The project champion, client, or project manager, as appropriate, offers closing comments.
9. The project manager announces the time and place of the next meeting and adjourns the meeting.

Minutes are part of the formal project documentation and are taken at each meeting, circulated for comment, revised as appropriate, distributed, and filed in the electronic project notebook. Because there is little discussion, the minutes contain any handouts from the meeting and list the items assigned for the next meeting. The minutes should also contain the list of attendees, a summary of comments made, and assigned responsibilities.

An administrative support person should be present at the project status review meetings to take minutes and monitor handouts. This responsibility might also be shared by the project team members. In some organizations, the same person is responsible for distributing the meeting agenda and materials ahead of time for review. This advance distribution is especially important if decisions will be made during the meeting. People are very uncomfortable when they are given important information for the first time and are immediately expected to read it, understand it, and then make a decision about it.

The 15-Minute Daily Status Meeting

These short status meetings were originally introduced as a tool to monitor and control agile and extreme projects. For small projects (teams of less than 10 members), the entire project team meets frequently (every morning for about 15 minutes in the team war room, for example). For larger projects, the task leaders should meet every morning. These are stand-up meetings where status is reported. Each attendee who has a task open for work should report. Open for work means the task start date has passed and the task is not yet complete. In their reports, the meeting attendees state where they are with respect to the time line (ahead, on target, or behind) and by how many hours or days. If they are behind, they should briefly state whether or not they have a get-well plan and when they expect to be back on schedule. If anyone in the meeting is able to help, they should say so and take that conversation offline. Problems and issues are not discussed in the daily status meeting except to add them to the Scope Bank and Issues Log. Their resolution or further clarification should be dealt with by the affected parties offline. Do not use team time to discuss things that are of interest to only a few members.

Problem Management Meetings

Problem management meetings provide an oversight function to identify, monitor, and resolve problems that arise during the life of a project. Every project has problems. No matter how well planned or managed the project is, there will always be problems. Many problems arise just as an accident of nature. Consider the following scenario as an example: One of your key staff members has resigned just as she was to begin working on a critical-path activity. Her skills are in high demand, and she will be difficult to replace. Each day that her position remains vacant is another day's delay in the project. It seems like an impossible problem. Nevertheless, you (as the project manager) must be ready to take action in such cases. The problem management meeting is one vehicle for addressing all problems that need to be escalated above the individual for definition, solution identification, and resolution.

This is an important function in the management of projects, especially large projects. Problems are often identified in the project status meeting and referred to the appropriate team members for resolution. A group is assembled to work on the problem. Progress reports are presented and discussed at a problem management meeting. Problem management meetings usually begin with a review of the status of the activity that resulted in the problem, followed by a statement of the problem and a discussion to ensure that everyone has the same understanding of the problem. At that point, the meeting should move into the problem-solving process that was discussed in detail in Chapter 6.