Importance Of Status Report And Status Meetings In The Project

Project Management / By

The importance of any meeting is when it involves updates on reporting from all project managers thus generating a comprehensive view of the performance of the business group. Good coordination and discussion on the meeting reviews and reports is helpful to decide what preventative actions needs to be undertaken.`

Generally the Project Manager conducts a project update meeting for discussing the following three parameters with the team:

  • Priorities – Which tasks do we need to focus on first? Who has assigned it?
  • Risks – What things could block completion of the priority tasks? What can we do to keep these from occurring?
  • Opportunities – What could we do to accelerate the completion of the priority tasks and how to capture those opportunities to bring them to reality?

If the organization is using a web-based enterprise system, stakeholders has the visibility and transparency and the team can answer their questions easily.
Meetings require to be objective driven with a tight agenda and pre-read list each delivering stakeholder can then state their respective deliverables for the coming reporting period. What is important is how to use these meetings and the status reports to add value to your project? Most status meetings are repetition of the information that was already included in the status report. Some managers prefer internal meetings to solve the problems. Schedule these to a particular frequency and allow any member of the team to bring their issues to the table for the group to help them address. Project Status Reports are usually contractual-type deliverables and must therefore be created. The status meetings allow the sponsor and key stakeholders to understand where the project is and ask questions about outstanding issues and “triggered” risks. These meetings are also important because key stakeholders want to know how the performance is, and in case it is not on track, how you are going to get it back on track.

The status report is distributed to all the stakeholders and to the people above the project manager on the organizational chart. Also it should be an artifact that can be reviewed by all team members, so that everyone understands the condition of the project through the eyes of the project manager. These meetings should be held on a regular basis so that the PM is getting current information that will be folded into the status report. The status report is essential for the meeting, however, the status meeting should never consist of reading through the report, instead it should provide an opportunity to highlight issues and setbacks.

Status meetings can be internal or external. In case of external meeting the project manager may not control the agenda and so needs to have a solid handle on all the issues. The internal meeting needs to be ‘safe’ yet professional. Status meeting should be utilized to discuss on high risk/issues and next actions to move forward or plan and prioritize activities with mutual agreement. Status report include collecting status within a single team when no discussion or coordination is needed whereas status meeting includes collecting status across multiple teams.

 

About Aditi Malhotra

Aditi Malhotra is the Content Marketing Manager at Whizlabs. Having a Master in Journalism and Mass Communication, she helps businesses stop playing around with Content Marketing and start seeing tangible ROI. A writer by day and a reader by night, she is a fine blend of both reality and fantasy. Apart from her professional commitments, she is also endearing to publish a book authored by her very soon.

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