Ithuta JV

Source: TenStep Article by Tom Mochal

Practice Good Meeting Fundamentals
In general, all meetings should have an agenda. The creation of the agenda takes a little extra work, but it can be as simple as writing it in an email and sending it to the meeting participants. Regularly scheduled, ongoing status meetings do not necessarily need a published agenda every week if they stick to the same agenda format. In those cases, the formal agenda is of most value while the team is first meeting. Once everyone understands the purpose and the regular flow, the standard agenda model can be reused every time. Other meeting considerations include:

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• If you have a large group of people attending the meetings, there should be a meeting facilitator, although the role can be rotated for regularly scheduled meetings. This is usually the person who requested the meeting unless other arrangements have been made. For ongoing status meetings, the facilitator is usually the project manager.
• Make sure the participants know ahead of time of anything they need to bring to the meeting or any advance preparation that needs to take place.
• Only invite the people that need to be there. Others may dilute the effectiveness of the meeting.
• The meeting should start on time, with some allowance for those that may be coming from another meeting.
• The person who requested the meeting should explain the purpose and the expected outcome.
• The facilitator needs to follow the agenda and watch the time to make sure everything gets covered.
• Someone should document any action items assigned during the meeting. This will be the facilitator or originator unless other arrangements have been made. This person is sometimes called a “scribe”.
• The scribe should recap all outstanding action items toward the end of the meeting, including who is responsible, what is expected, and when the action item is due.
• The scribe or facilitator should recap any decisions that were made and document them in an email (or other project communication mode as appropriate).

Keep Status Meetings Focused
There is always a temptation to engage in problem solving when you have all the key people together at one time. However, the concern about problem solving is that usually only a few people are engaged in any one problem, while everyone else is unengaged and wasting time. While you have everyone together, use the time to discuss general status, issues, scope and risk. These are all features of overall project health and should be of interest to all team members. There can certainly be some problem solving if there is time on the agenda, but the facilitator should make sure that the problems are of interest to most of the team members.

A common complaint in status meetings is that they take too long. Some projects have status meetings that last two hours and longer. These long meetings are usually caused by too much problem solving that is not relevant to all of the meeting participants. The best way to focus status meetings that are too long is to simply reduce the time allocated to the meeting. For instance, if you meet for two hours per week and find that you cannot complete all your work, try reducing the time of the meetings to 90 or 60 minutes. Keep the status meetings short with a tight agenda to be most effective. Take any lengthy discussions offline or to a separate meeting that focuses on these items with the people that are most interested.

Ask for Team Status Reports on a “Frequent Enough” Basis
The frequency of status reporting is based on the length of the project and the speed in which you need to react. For instance, if your project is two months long and the project manager receives Status Reports from the team members on a monthly basis, there is not enough time to respond if problems are reported. A good rule of thumb is as follows:
• Small projects may not need formal status reporting.
• Team members on medium projects should report status every week.
• Team members on large projects should report status every week or perhaps every two weeks.
Status updates are also somewhat situational. For instance, if critical activities are occurring, you may need status updates on a daily basis. This may be the case around implementation time when a lot of work needs to converge in the final days of the project.

Include Information of Value in Status Reports – Not the Mundane
Let’s face it: Status Reports are typically not as effective as they should be. This is true for team members that submit Status Reports to the project manager, as well as project managers that are submitting Status Reports to their major stakeholders. One of the major reasons is that the people completing the reports look upon them as a chore and not as a way to communicate valuable information. You typically get a Status Report that is very brief and says nothing, or else you get a Status Report that contains all the mundane activities that a person did.
The person creating the Status Reports needs to write it so that the reader can use the information in them in the decision-making process. The information needs to be of value. The writer should ask himself whether the information on the Status Report is there to really communicate something valuable or is it just taking up space.
Typically the Status Report should focus on the following:
• Accomplishments against the assigned activities on the schedule
• Comments on work that should be completed but is behind schedule
• Problems (issues) encountered, the impact to the project, and what is being done to resolve them
• Scope change requests
• Newly identified risks
• Observations that will be useful to the reader
If you focus on this type of information in your Status Report, you will find that the information is meaningful and can be used to help manage the project and keep the stakeholders informed. People will stop paying attention if you report on the trivial events of the reporting period.