How to Hold a Productive Project Status Meeting
Why do project status meetings have such a bad reputation? Well, for one thing, they take an hour (or more) of time you’ll never get back. They’re usually slow. They’re often plodding. Each person is an active participant while reporting his or her status but then must sit there, eyes glazing over, while all the others report their statuses. Boring!
But project status meetings don't have to be all bad. Status meetings let team members report what they’re doing and whether they’re hitting targets. It’s a way to communicate face to face (or at least voice to voice, with remote workers). Status meetings help new members of the team integrate into the group. They help the project manager identify weaknesses early enough to make adjustments—perhaps earlier than the weaknesses might have become obvious otherwise. And the meetings are an opportunity to discuss options for supporting team members who can use some extra assistance.
So maybe it’s worth finding better ways to hold such meetings. For example, don’t hold the meeting on Monday. By holding it on Tuesday, people can spend Monday ramping up from the weekend and still have Wednesday through Friday to act on any important issues that come up in the meeting.
Whatever day you choose, start the meeting by focusing on a specific issue, such as where the project is relative to the projected schedule or budget, or what progress has been made toward the next key milestone.
To make the meeting productive, try having it revolve around questions that can surface about important issues. For example, what risks are we facing, and what do we need to do about them? What’s changed that could affect our ability to deliver? What process or infrastructure improvement could we make that would improve our ability to deliver?
It could also be useful occasionally to ask, as CEO Patty Azzarello suggests, “What stupid stuff are we doing?" Questioning ingrained habits and processes that no longer serve their original purposes can spark some energy and weed out inefficiencies.
To keep people alert, status meetings shouldn’t be simply sit-and-listen gatherings. They are an opportunity for discussion and a chance for team members to ask questions about issues of concern. Learning about these concerns gives the project manager an opportunity not only to respond to these concerns but also to reinforce key points about the project.
Some project managers find that holding status meetings on a fixed schedule increases the focus on results. People who know they’re going to have to account for how they’ve spent their time are less likely to procrastinate. And given Parkinson’s law that work expands to fill the time available for its completion, perhaps the reverse is also true: By holding a status meeting, work will compress to fit the time remaining for its completion. What do you think?
