Latest Post
project status meetings: to meet or not to meet
Being a green PM, I figured that project status meetings were a sine quo non. Who doesn’t love getting the team together for a nice, juicy status meeting every week? However, I did some digging and found that some folks are against the status meeting (one such person being Rita Mulcahy, author of the popular PMP prep books) and some are for status meetings. Mulcahy makes the point that status meetings aren’t necessary and instead team members should email their reports in to the PM and the PM should then send the report to everyone. That way, everyone is in the loop and nobody has to ever interact face-to-face with anyone else on the project. Yay. I kid – I’m sure that, on very large projects, this is the best way to get the status updates.
Others who are anti-status meeting describe how they must endure endless reports from team members that have no impact on their own work and their own role in the project. They liken this to being subjected to fingernails on a chalkboard or worse, watching Love Boat reruns for hours every week for the duration of the project. They don’t say this outright but I’m sure this is what they are trying to say. Seriously though I could see how it could be a time waster to sit through a meeting listening to a bunch of updates when each person’s work on the project doesn’t impact the work of others and there aren’t dependencies across the project.
I’ve thought it over and I still think status meetings are worthwhile but I guess the important piece is that it depends on the project. Here is why/when I think project status meetings might come in handy:
- Team members are very busy and your project isn’t the only one they are working on – it is one of many – having a status meeting forces them to stop and think about the project and the work they need to do to complete their part of the project. When they see the agenda come out 3-4 days before the meeting with the action items at the top, 1) they are reminded of those things they needed to get done in time for the meeting and 2) they are alerted to where we are in the project plan.
- Getting everyone together can link up people who require information from one another but who are too busy or too distant from one another to get together otherwise. I can give an example. At our last status meeting, our IT person required some information from the Scheduling Dept. This guy is one of the busiest people I know – he is not going to run around asking people for information – but if I provide a venue where he can get access to that information, he gets the information he requires. And it just so happens that other people might need the same information! Why not expedite the process of information-sharing, I say.
- Incidental conversations are very revealing and important! If I ask for a report via email, I usually get just the facts ma’am, but if I have everyone sitting down in the same room, one comment leads to another which leads to another and before we know it we’ve uncovered some really great nuggets of information. Also, people tend to be more open for some reason. They may share just the facts that they think are important in their status update via email, but once they sit down with everyone, they tend to open up – in this way, I’ve identified risk triggers and also previously unidentified risks (for example, when the IT Director casually mentioned that he’s thinking of doing a major upgrade to a system we’re using during the project! Who knew!) I’m not saying that status meetings should be long, rambling conversations that go on all day – of course, it is important to stick to the agenda and the prescribed meeting time – but within that, I think there is still room for uncovering relevant info!
I think we often think that projects are cut and dried and if the PM doesn’t have all the information going in to the meeting, s/he is a bad PM. I disagree – projects are performed by people, not machines, and people are very complex. If you need to get information from people, you need to talk to them and not perform everything with email. At least that’s my take right now…what’s yours?
photo courtesy of wonderferret on Flickr
RSS feed
