Boring Meetings Suck: Get More Out of Your Meetings, or Get Out of More Meetings

Project and Update Meetings Suck

If you've ever worked on a detailed project, or even a simple project, with an overbearing leader, you know what I'm talking about. A major time waster is the regularly scheduled project or update meeting. What's the primary purpose of this type of meeting? Having a collective group of people share information so that each participant knows the overall status or milestones affecting their work. Is it important? Heck, yeah! If you have a milestone that depends on others completing their tasks, and their task orientation has changed in scope or deadline, you need to know about it. It colors everything from your daily work plan to the outcome of the project.

Unfortunately, many of these status meetings simply rehash or confirm what you already know. You know you're in the land of project-meeting abuse if you find yourself thinking, “My report to the group will be the same as last time. Please, not another déjà meeting. I'm on schedule. My team is doing what we said we'd do. Do I really need to be there?”

You may have one of those project managers who feels he or she needs to have a meeting, no matter what, so that it looks like he or she is keeping up. Yup, been there!

Jim Canterucci is an expert in project management and author of Change Project Management: The Next Step and the Amazon.com best-seller Personal Brilliance. Jim points out that the attributes that make project managers successful tend to carry over to the meeting environment. Meeting ...