Effective Software Project Management

Project Status Meetings

You are no doubt overloaded with meetings. How often do you find yourself saying, “Why am I here? What’s the purpose of this meeting?” How many times do you attend a meeting from which no decisions were taken, no action items identified? Doesn’t that seem like a big waste of time? Well, it is, and it shouldn’t be tolerated. In this section I discuss project status meetings and in the following section problem management meetings. These are the two types of meetings you should attend, meetings with a purpose.

What Is a Project Status Meeting?

In order to keep close track of progress on the project, the project manager needs to have information from his/her team on a timely basis. This information will be given during a project status meeting. At a minimum you need to have a status meeting at least once a week. On some of the major projects on which we’ve worked, daily status meetings were the norm for the first few weeks, and then as the need for daily information wasn’t as critical we switched to twice a week and finally to weekly status.

Who Should Attend?

In order to use the status meetings correctly and efficiently, it’s necessary to figure out who should be in attendance. This should be a part of your communication plan, and it’s actually very important to know who should and shouldn’t be a part of the status meetings.

At first your status team has a tendency to include people who are needed only in the planning phase. If they don’t have a need to ...