Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, Sixth Edition

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 ...