Question: It always seems that most PMs need to be careful balancing daily and weekly activities, meetings, and phone calls to capture all necessary information without overburdening the rest of the project team. What would you consider to be the best team member contact, along with the best time for collecting tasks and daily informational updates on critical milestones?
Ah, one of the great balancing acts of a project manager! Too little project status communication, and your project runs the risk of spinning out of control before you are able to do something about it. Too much project status communication, and you drive the team crazy with incessant ''What’s the status?'' requests only to hear the response ''Nothing has changed since you asked me five minutes ago!'' Neither situation is ideal, and either can lead to a failed project.
Over the years I’ve determined a few very basic guidelines to better right-size status reporting and optimizing the process for the situation:
1. Don’t go longer than one week between status meetings.
I feel it’s very important that the team get together either face to face or virtually if logistics don’t permit to discuss the status of tasks and for team members (or team leads for larger projects) to report on the progress of tasks to plan. A weekly, recurring, standing project meeting is a great means for getting into a regular status reporting cadence.
2. Set interim follow-up status updates for critical tasks, significant project issues, and risks which are coming true.
During your regularly scheduled status meeting, determine if a follow-up date prior to your next status meeting needs to be set for critical schedule, issue, or risk items. For example, if you hold regularly scheduled project status meetings on Tuesdays and you have a critical task which needs to be completed on Thursday, you should ask for a milestone status report on Thursday to gauge whether the task was completed on schedule. By not doing so and waiting until the next Tuesday status meeting, you could get a surprise that the task to be completed on Thursday wasn’t done per schedule.
3. Set an expectation of when you want status to be reported.
As part of your status reporting cadence, establish when you are expecting a normal status to be reported and stick to it. If your status meetings are on Tuesday, establish a regular rhythm of status reports being completed and submitted either prior to the meeting or at the meeting. More importantly, don’t be shy about holding others accountable when they don’t have their status reports ready. I don’t mind one bit someone being held accountable in a public forum if he or she doesn’t do what is expected.
4. Avoid surprise status requests.
As a project manager your job is to keep things as predictable as possible. Don’t drop by a team member’s desk unannounced asking for the status on a particular item. You’ll just frustrate the team member, and you may not get as accurate a status report as needed. Minimize the surprises for the team and set expectations for when status needs to be reported.
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About the Author
Lonnie Pacelli is an internationally recognized author and is president of Leading on the Edge International. Lonnie has had over 20 years of leadership experience as an executive, project manager, developer, tester, analyst, trainer, consultant, and business owner. During his 11 years at Accenture, he built leadership expertise consulting with many Fortune 500 companies including Motorola, Hughes Electronics, and Northrop Grumman. During his nine years at Microsoft, he continued building leadership expertise through the development of some of Microsoft’s internal systems, led their corporate procurement group, managed their corporate planning group, and led company-wide initiatives on continuous fiscal improvement and training process optimization. He has successfully implemented projects ranging from complex IT systems to process reengineering to business strategies.
See more on Lonnie at www.leadingonedge.com and www.smallbizmadesimple.com.
