Running a Project Status Meeting

Lynda Bourne has a nice post on managing meetings. While there are lots of reasons for meetings, a critical meeting is the weekly project status meeting. In this meeting the project team determines if they are on schedule, on budget, and on technical performance.

In order to do this is a short time, there must be a scripted set of processes. These process come from my experience in the aerospace and defense business and most importantly from Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (RFETS) and the recent case study Making the Impossible Possible: Leading Extrordinary Performance, The Rocky Flats Story.

By the way, this book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in how modern management principles are applied to complex, high risk, high reward projects. It is a description of the practices of project, people, and process management in the presence of uncertainty, emergence, and conflicting forces. All the management book writers need to read how those tasked with producing success actually did it.

One critical outcome of the RFTES experience was the Plan of the Week and evenutally the Plan of the Day. But first we need to start with the end in mind.

The principle role of Project Management is to avoid surprises. You can be late, you can be over budget, the gadget youare building can not work yet. But it can't be a surprise.

Next comes the actual Plan of the Week

• The Plan of the Week (PoW) is a framework for planning the work and working the plan.
• The PoW is derived from the Integrated Master Schedule (IMS).
• Coming due items for the 3 week look head (moving window) are extracted from the IMS for each CAM to discuss.
• These include the planned starts and planned finished during the period. This report is produced on the Thursday prior to the weekly Program Review.
• Each Control Account Management (CAM)(a project manager in the PMI sense) discusses those coming due items and speaks to the confidence that they will completed on or before the due date – either started or finished. With this information, the CAMs can then have a conversation among themselves of the commitments needed for the interdependencies between their planned work.

These coming due items are taken from the Integrated Master Schedule. This data is extracted after the schedule is statusted the previous week. In our case that is the Thursday prior to the Tuesday Project Status Meeting

This list is the items that:

• Are planned to be started in the coming 3 weeks
• Are planned to be finished in the coming 3 weeks.

With this list the Project Status meeting can now start. This meeting is broken into 3 segments.

First 15 minutes

• the Program Manager (or Project Manager) reviews all the coming dues from the extracted report from the prior weeks status. This status is the physical percent complete update from the owners of the work. This status is the basis of the Earned Value updates to the Work Packages and the flow up to the Control Accounts.
• The Program Manager will review the collective coming due data and provide a summary of the high points, major risks, and discussion topics for the remainder of the meeting.
• During this first 15 minutes of the Plan of the Week the PM will all report the activities scheduled for the coming weeks that require senior management action.
• If there are items planned for the week that are not on the spreadsheet they will be noted and added AFTER the first 15 minute phase of the meeting.

Second 15 minutes

• After the Plan of the Week items have been reviewed by the PM and the CAMs  to confirm they have everything for the next 3 weeks 
• Additions, changes, or deletes made, we can move to “new business,” which will include items that:
  • Did not complete when promised 
  • Have been rescheduled for the coming period 
  • Have been moved to future date
• Items not completed as promised will be called out for corrective action.

Last 30 Minutes

• Each CAM will walk through the coming due items and confirm that the dependencies required for success to that deliverable or completion items are in place.
  • Planned to start in the next 3 weeks
  • Planned to finish in the next 3 weeks
• External dependencies
  • Each CAM will confirm with other CAMs owning that external dependency that the required items will be available when needed.
  • If not, then the supplying CAM must state when that item will be available.
• Wrap up
  • All CAMs and the PM concur that the planned start and planned finish items will take place on or before the planned date.

This is the shortened version of the script for the Plan of the Week. But the time frame is always the same. The primary purpose of the PoW is to assure ourselves that we are not violating any of the root causes of project failure which are described below.

There are more casues of course, but these have been shown to be the most important from the program controls side of the management processes. We'll assume there is a good set of requirements, all the stakeholders are behaving properly, and all the other softer issues are being handled. If not, you've got a much bigger problem on your hands.

A Final Reminder of the 5 Immutable Principles

As always these project status meeting processes fit into a larger context.

All the management theories and next generation principles aren't going to get you anywhere if you don't know the answers to those 5 Immutable questions.If you can't control the sources of project train wreck all the "next generation" team building and management won't help. You must have tangible evidence that the project is making progress according to plan.

That has to be credible of course, but with the plan you must be able to see if you're going in the right direction toward DONE.

Now using Lynda's advice, add the mechanics of conducting the project review weekly meeting.