So much of my work life has been lost to long, tedious, low-value gatherings called either “status meetings” or “progress meetings.” As a project manager, I certainly believe in the importance of getting the team into the same room (or conference call) at the same time. But too often, I’ve had to join status meetings that leave me frustrated with how much time they burn up and how little new information I take away.

The knowledge-worker culture has developed some bad habits regarding respect (or lack thereof) for people’s time. This leads meeting organizers – notably project managers – to make some fundamental mistakes about why a team should get together and what they should be able to accomplish. For managers of any kind, here is my list of top status meeting mistakes.

Mistake 1: Let’s Have Status Meetings

How much fun do YOU have telling a roomful of people what you’ve done for the past week, and “where you’re at”? Probably a little more fun than listening to other people tell you “where they’re at,” but not much fun overall, I’ll bet.

In general, no team should depend on a meeting to convey or learn status. Meetings that exist just to exchange status are hugely inefficient and ultimately an expensive use of talent. Multiply the number of attendees times the meeting length to get the number of person-hours lost to a low-value information exchange that spreads a little news but doesn’t really solve problems. When you meet, do so for a purpose with more value, like resolving the top five hot issues or mitigating an emerging risk or adapting to a scope change.

This is especially true when you consider that status updates are communicated most efficiently in writing. Status reports typically cover four general topics: recent accomplishments, progress toward milestones, next actions, and hot issues. Status information is easy to write. It should be as simple as filling in a form, pasting text from a log, typing a progress percentage, even checking a box. Status reports consume far fewer person-hours than meetings, and both  writer and reader can write or read status reports on their own schedule and terms. It’s a perfect opportunity for asynchronous communication.

So to my way of thinking, status meetings shouldn’t exist at all in a project with an efficient status reporting protocol. This assumes some measure of collaborative technology ranging from mere e-mail to online project workspaces. Instead of status meetings, project teams really need “situation rooms” – periodic meetings to handle issues, exceptions, anomalies, the unplanned, and the unexpected. In general, people would much rather work their brains by solving something than having to listen to something they either already know or probably don’t care about.

So for the rest of this rant, I’ll refer to “weekly meetings” instead of “status meetings.”

Mistake 2: We Don’t Need an Agenda

How often have you heard, “This meeting will be short,” only to have it turn into a long conversational equivalent of elevator music? This is one wart on the toad of meetings with no agenda. The team wanders into the room with vague expectations of going over “status” but with no preparation for contributing to important questions or issues that somebody knew about beforehand but kept to themselves.

If you want to encourage engagement in a meeting of any length, build a list of the topics you want to walk through, set time limits on each one, link specific people to each topic, and set forth the probable outcome. It’s best to be as specific as possible in your topic choices, too. If you’re going to go over the bug list, list the titles of the top five bugs you absolutely have to get through. If you finish those five bugs early, great. You can get everybody back to their desks sooner, or you can feel out the crowd to see if a few more bugs can be stomped.

Also important: Publish the agenda the day before the meeting, or at least a few hours earlier. Part of an agenda’s value is that it encourages preparation. It should come standard for almost every meeting.

It’s kind of like teaching: Say what you’re going to talk about, then talk about what you said you’d talk about, then review what you just talked about. Result: clarity and a sense of having learned something new.

Mistake 3: Every Weekly Meeting Should Have the Same Agenda

Ralph Waldo Emerson must have been to some of the same meetings I have:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

I’ll stand up first to say that consistency in anything is important for stability, clarity, predictability, and a bunch of other benefits. However, there is no rule in the PMBOK or any other arbiter of project practices that says that you can’t mix it up now and then. As long as you tell the team beforehand (using the revered agenda), introduce some variety and shine the spotlight on particular themes instead of the overall project every week. For example, focus one meeting a month on risk management, another on documentation needs, another on change management efforts, and so forth. It’s usually hard to touch on all of project’s workstreams in one hour a week, so instead of carving that hour into little topical pieces, carve a month of weekly meetings into a set of rolling topics that merit some focused conversation.

Mistake 4: We Don’t Need Meeting Minutes

It’s easy to believe you’ll always remember something until you forget that you need to remember.

It’s not that easy to tell when you’ll really need to look back at an action item or decision that was made in a meeting many months ago.

They might seem superfluous at the time they’re published, but sometimes it takes only a few days for the value of meeting notes to shine forth. A common example is when a team member needs to look up the minutes to remember which action items were assigned to her this week. The more classic case, of course, are the decision forensics that occur later on when somebody (usually an exec) questions an outcome.

To make meeting notes useful and easy, you don’t have to record a detailed journal of everything that was said. You need only the action items, key decisions, new issues, and the guest list. It makes meeting minutes easier if the person taking the notes is not the person running the meeting.

Mistake 5: Every Problem Must Be Solved Now

If your weekly meetings have evolved from status drudgery up to solving problems, that’s a step in the right direction. The pothole that now opens will probably be the conviction by some or all that every issue that gets raised should get solved before the closing bell rings. Unfortunately, that’s hard to do. If discussion about any single issue goes longer than five or ten minutes, the meeting chair should pound a gavel and send the discussion offline. This will be popular with the attendees who have nothing to say about the long issue and have other issues they want to get to.

Mistake 6: Everybody Needs a New Copy of the Project Plan

I mourn for the timber that gets sacrificed for the printing of the latest version of the project plan for every weekly project meeting. Except for the beginning of a project, most team members will care only for tasks with their name, so copies of the whole plan will get only a brief glance before falling into the trash can. For team members who are not used to looking at project plans very often, being asked to examine a grid full of small-print numbers, dates, and names will keep their attention for about five seconds. They don’t want to see a detailed copy of the big picture every week. They just want to know about any changes to their own tasks, and about their upstream or downstream dependencies.

Once a plan is in motion, team members should be able to pull a view of the whole plan on their own time from an online collaboration workspace or the wall in the hallway. For summarizing progress and project metrics, a dashboard approach works well: a single page or screen with the key progress indicators depicted clearly, usually graphically.

If it’s needed for context – say, to address the downstream implications of a recent scope change – a portion of the project plan can be handed out, but ideally only if it can be made to fit on one or two pages at a standard font size. Anything more will induce the glazed looks of people looking for their five pet bees in a busy hive.

Mistake 7: Everybody Needs to Be at the Weekly Meeting

See the previous item. If the agenda varies, times will occur in which the topic at hand is irrelevant to some of the team. This is another benefit of having an agenda in advance. If it’s obvious up front that a few particular team members won’t be able to get much or give much relative to a particular set of topics, give them a meeting reprieve. You’ll give them an hour they didn’t expect to have, and show that you respect their time and attention. (You’ll need to emphasize that it’s related to current specific agenda items so that an attendance issue doesn’t start to occur later.)

This same mistake is made when sponsors and stakeholders are invited to weekly meetings – a sure-fire way to risk the failure of an agenda. Conversational “scope creep” inevitably occurs the more people you have in a meeting, especially if some of those people are functional managers or executives. They’ll feel compelled to speak, sometimes often. If the value of weekly team meetings becomes diluted because more than the core team attends, protect the time and focus of your core team and set up separate meetings or different ways of communicating with non-core folks.

Mistake 8: All Weekly Meetings Have to Take an Hour

Heck, no. Just enough is plenty.

Rant Over

These are, of course, just my thoughts. I’d love to hear what anybody else thinks.