Status Meetings

As you go through the project, one of the important actions that you take is to set up status meetings for the project team. In these meetings, you look at the project baseline and discuss the project's status, or in other words, how well you have kept to the original plan. You will have a Schedule and a WBS at a very minimum. Even if you don't create formal plans for other areas (which will happen in some cases, particularly in fairly short projects), you must have a Schedule and a WBS to manage a project.

For many organizations, it seems that meetings take the place of working. Don't let this happen on your projects. First, you should write down and formalize who is going to attend the status meetings. This simple information is part of the communication plan. Who should go to the meetings? That depends on who needs information to get the project done. On long projects, there may be people who won't be involved at the beginning of the project but who will do important tasks later. There is no, I repeat, no good reason to ask those people to be at the early status meetings. You can talk to them by phone, keep them up to date, email them, but they do not need to sit in meetings where the discussion doesn't directly affect them. If their tasks begin five months from now, you shouldn't demand that they sit through early status meetings unless they actually want to do so. If they find it helpful to be there, people will ask to be informed about when your status meetings are held. If they find it painfully boring to sit through status meetings that give them no useful information for their particular part of the project, you will see their eyes glaze over during your meetings. Let them out. They will be appreciative.

Q.	Who should go to status meetings?
		A.	The Project Team
		B.	The people in the communication plan
		C.	The Project Team and Sponsor
		D.	Stakeholders

The answer is B, the people listed in the communication plan. It is easy to get too many people involved in status meetings. Put a list of necessary people in the communication plan and stick to it.

How long should status meetings last? If you can't keep a status meeting under one hour, you will have some very unhappy people. The only time a status meeting may go longer is when major changes in the original plan have been approved and everyone needs to know. However, if you are prepared for a status meeting, there isn't really much that cannot be said or conveyed within an hour.

How often should status meetings be held? At least once a week is the PMI suggestion, and it is sound project management practice. There may be times just after the project is launched when you meet more than once a week; sometimes every day is a good idea. But you certainly shouldn't go longer than a week in between. In order to control the project, information needs to be available on a timely basis. Keeping people in the dark about how the project is going is not a recommended way to manage a project.

Q.	Status meetings should be held at least:
		A.	Once a year
		B.	Once a week
		C.	Every day
		D.	As little as possible

The answer is B, once a week. If you space meetings out any longer than this, you might overlook problems that need to be handled promptly. The only time that daily meetings are required may be at the beginning of the project when the project team members are getting to know each other.

How do you prepare for a status meeting? First, and absolutely necessarily for running a meeting on time, you should put out an agenda. Every major item that will be discussed should be on that agenda. This forces both you and your project team to think through what needs to be done at the status meeting. Send the agenda out to the participants before the meeting. Ask people to reply to you by email if they want additional topics discussed in the status meeting. Then send out a final agenda and ask the people to bring it to the meeting.

On the agenda, list the amount of discussion time for each status item. Then stick to it in your first status meeting, and you will be in control of the amount of time the meeting takes. As the project manager, and with the agenda in front of everybody, just go down the list, and as you do, mention how much time is allotted to that topic. Stop talking about the topic when the time is up. If you write down a topic will take ten minutes, stop the discussion in ten minutes. This will shock some people the first time you do it, particularly in an organization that is used to long meetings, but do it anyway. People who go through this type of status meeting recognize how much time you are saving, and everyone with whom I have worked appreciates not having to be in long, boring meetings. Remember that you are managing your project off of a schedule and a WBS, both of which are timed. Run your meetings like you run your project.

Q.	The most important document for running a status meeting professionally is:
		A.	The WBS
		B.	The Scope Statement
		C.	An agenda
		D.	SOW

The answer is C, an agenda. It is your most important tool for keeping a meeting on track.

During the status meeting, someone should act as a scribe and take notes for the meeting. Sometimes this person will be the project manager. On large projects, it may be someone from the staff. It is important to take notes. It is more important to get those notes out to the people who attended the meeting. Ask for corrections. If no corrections are sent back to you, file the notes.

One way of making sure that you are discussing every important item is to record the meeting. I have known several good project managers who had a recording function on their laptop computers. When the meeting was over, they would go through the recording to make sure that what they wrote down was actually what was said. It may seem a bit laborious, but it works, and it helps ensure that the people in the team are getting a good representation of what was said at the meetings.

And, oh yes, keep the notes short. You are not transcribing every word of the status meeting, just giving highlights. During the meeting, you should note if an action item occurs. An action item is something that needs to be done by someone on the project team. Make sure during the meeting that someone takes responsibility for each action item. List action items at the end of the meeting notes and also list who is responsible for each item. Also make sure that each action item has a time frame. They should not be left open. Just as each item in your WBS has a time attached to it, so should your action items from a status meeting.

Q.	The person writing down meeting notes for a project status meeting is called a:
		A.	Bookkeeper
		B.	Secretary
		C.	Scribe
		D.	Project Manager

The answer is C, scribe. The scribe may or may not be the project manager. It depends on the size of the project and the staff.