By Cindy Vandersleen, PMP

One of the most common practices in many project team meetings is the classic “go around the room and collect status” from each team member.   This works quite well for the project manager because everyone is collected together and in an efficient hour’s time he/she can collect the information needed for the weekly status report.  The problem with that is that for everyone else in the room, once they have their 2-5 minutes of fame reporting their status, the rest of the time is usually irrelevant to them, so they tend to zone out, talk amongst themselves, do email, or yes, even yawn off. 

The real crime here is that beyond being disrespectful of the project team member’s time, you are losing a great opportunity to do something really important that doesn’t get done enough on projects.  You’re not leveraging the opportunity of the team gathering to harness the collective wisdom of the group to solve problems.  After all what is the real purpose of the team meeting?  While it may be a bit more work, something as mundane and two dimensional as collecting status can be done by the project manager in separate offline one on one conversations prior to the team meeting.  A group meeting should be used to review the status collected, capture new issues and risks, and brainstorm solutions as a team.  This way everyone in the room is actually getting real information in the meeting as well as working toward issue resolutions.

This usually works best when a regular meeting cadence is established where one on one meetings to gather status occur early in the week.  The project manager processes these and updates the project schedule and then uses this as a visual presentation tool along with the issue log and risk register at the weekly team meeting.  The weekly team meeting is scheduled for mid week.  The team reviews status against plan and discusses any issues reported, and captures any new issues in the log.  For any issues requiring long discussions, an offline meeting is scheduled.  At every team meeting the risk register should be reviewed to solicit any new risks and assign owners, and review the mitigation plans of previous risks.   By using team meetings for such healthy discussions, the resulting actions and information give the project manager a wealth of data for the status report he/she prepares at the end of the week.   More importantly, the team members will view the team meetings as a time each week when real communication and teambuilding occurs, not just as a waste of their time.