COMMUNICATIONS and MEETINGS

Stay Focused at Status Meetings

If you find that you are spending too much time in status meetings, it is usually a sign of too much problem solving. While you have everyone together, use the time to discuss general status, issues, scope and risk. The best way to focus status meetings that are too long is to simply reduce the time allocated to them. 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.

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 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:

· 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.

·  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.

· Recap any decisions that were made and document them in an email (or other project communication mode as appropriate).

Use Standardized Reports

Avoid creating individualized reports for each person who needs information. Most people need only a standard set of information that can be communicated in a common project Status Report. If there is a need for information outside of the standard report, create an additional standard report to provide the information. For instance, you may have a detailed Status Report on a weekly basis and a summary Status Report on a monthly basis. You should, however, minimize ad-hoc status reporting requests as much as possible. They take extra time and usually provide only marginal value over the reports already being generated.

How Often Should Team Members Submit Status Reports?

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.

· Every week might make sense for medium projects.

· Every week or perhaps every other week might be appropriate for large projects.

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.

Include Useful Information 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 the Status Report that is very brief and says nothing, or else you get the Status Report that contains all the mundane activities that a person did.

Try to focus the Status Reports so that the information in them can be used in the decision-making process. The writer should ask him or herself 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 workplan

· 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.

Use Appendices for the Details

You want to focus on meaningful information in the status report. However, you may find that some of your audience finds meaning in the exceptions while others find meaning in the details.

Does that mean you need to create two status reports? You should not need to. One of the ways to satisfy both audiences is to write the formal Status Report as an exception-based document and include the details as appendices (attachments). For instance, most readers want to know the accomplishments from the prior period and the planned accomplishments for the next period.  However, your manager might want to see the entire workplan. To satisfy both, just include the workplan as an appendix. If you are emailing the information, you could email the current workplan as a separate document from the basic Status Report.

A similar example is a situation where you note an accomplishment about completing a significant amount of training. Your client might want to see the names of the people trained. Again, do not include this level of detail in the body of the report. Include the information in an appendix instead.

You Need Less Detail as you get Higher in the Organization

If you create a Communication Plan for your project, the needs of all your stakeholders will be analyzed formally. But even without a formal Communication Plan, always keep the organizational level of your audience in mind. Your team members need information that is highly detailed and highly specific to the work they are assigned. As the project manager, you need information that covers the entire project but at a less detailed level. The manager of the project manager needs to have information summarized and delivered at a higher level. The next higher manager needs information at a higher level still. Although your project is the most important thing on your mind, to senior management it may just be one of a number of important events they are trying to keep track of.

In some organizations, this filtering is a part of the communication system. For instance, you may give a status to your manager. Your manager receives the status from you, as well as from the other people that report to him or her. Your manager then summarizes and consolidates the information and passes a higher-level report to their manager. That manager in turn does the same thing until only very high-level information reaches the top. Therefore, senior management may just get a one-line status update on your project. In fact, if your project is on track, it may not even be mentioned at the executive level.

In other organizations, however, the status information is not summarized and passed upward. The project manager is the one that needs to communicate with multiple management levels. In that case, remember that one size of communication does not fit all. You may need to modify the communication content to each level of management. For instance, you may send a one-page report to your direct manager and your major clients showing the project status and financial situation. This may be summarized to a half-page for the next level of management and to perhaps a paragraph to the next level. 

Use the Best Communication Media

When you select the various types of communication that you need for your project, also determine the best medium for delivering the information. For instance:

· Status Reports. These do not have to be on paper. Depending on the person sending and receiving the information, the status can be communicated via voicemail, email, videoconference or other collaborative tools. Your organization may have a standard way of delivering status. If not, pick a manner of reporting that is convenient for the reader without compromising the value of the information.

· Email. Use email for routine messages, information sharing and some marketing related messages. Spread these out so that you don't inundate the same people over a short period of time.

· Voicemail. Use voicemail to leave simple messages to individual people or to entire departments. Complicated or long messages are not appropriate for voicemails.

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

You have all heard this saying (or something similar). It means that you do not take retribution against the person (or people) that deliver bad news. If you ask people for a status, accept the good and the bad for what it is – information for you to make better decisions. If you want people to tell you when there are problems, you need to accept the information and work with the team on causes and solutions (hopefully the team member is proposing solutions along with the problem).

All project managers need to take this message to heart. You want to hear bad news as quickly as possible so that you have a chance to respond quickly. Issues and risks that are surfaced early allow for much more flexibility in the response. You have much less flexibility to operate if you hear about them at the last minute. However, if people bring bad news to you and you respond negatively toward the person bringing the news, it will make it much harder for other “messengers” to come forward with bad news in the future.

Green / Yellow / Red Status Indicators

One good technique for providing an overall summary of a project is to include a green / yellow / red indicator. Just as you would expect, a green indicator means that the project is basically on track. It does not imply that there are no problems at all. But it does mean that all problems are being addressed and the project is basically on time and on budget.

A summary indicator of yellow means that there is some risk that the project will not meet its budget or deadline. Placing a yellow status indicator on the project is a way to manage expectations and let people know the project is at some risk.

If your project has an indicator of red, you are telling people you are definitely in trouble, and will need to compromise on budget, deadline and / or quality.

The real value of this indicator occurs when the project status is summarized for upper management. If senior management has a summary page of all projects, as well as a green / yellow / red indicator, they can easily see the overall status of the entire portfolio. If they manage by exception, they would immediately focus on those projects that are red and yellow.

Managing Expectations

One of the main purposes of managing communication on a project is to manage expectations. Status Reports, for instance, are a way of communicating to stakeholders how the project is progressing against its schedule and budget. You include information on issues, scope change, risks, etc., as a part of providing information to manage expectations. Additional information on managing client expectations is discussed in detail at 6.2.1.Manage Communication / Managing Expectations

Place Communication Events on Your Workplan

The project manager should treat communication events like any project deliverable. You should add the activities to the workplan and assign people and end-dates so that the team understands when the communication is expected and who is responsible for creating and delivering it.

Your workplan should include the people assigned and the due dates for your project Status Report to stakeholders, as well as the Status Reports you expect from your staff. You should include activities in your workplan for all your status meetings, sponsor meetings, steering committee meetings and any other scheduled meetings. Likewise, if you are creating a newsletter, add activities specifying when input is due and when the newsletter will go out. If you are not very specific on expectations and due dates, you will find these communication instances starting to slide. For instance, you may find your quarterly newsletter is distributed six weeks late and then you may decide to skip next quarter since it is too close to the last one.

Branding a Project

Most projects don’t have to worry about branding. Their scope is limited to a small set of people and the impact of the project on the organization is modest. However, some projects will affect an entire organization or company, and may take years to implement fully. These are the types of projects where it makes sense to build a positive image and associated good feelings. They are candidates for branding. See 6.1.2 Manage Communication / Branding a Project for more information.