Project Team Meetings

Project Team Meetings
By Curtis Clark

Project team meetings are important forum to both disseminating project information as well as receiving status of the progress of project activities from project team members. Project team meetings should be held on a regular schedule at a project team agreed upon time and place. An important component of project team meeting is to create and distribute the agenda for the meeting in advance. It is very important not to waste the time of project team members, so follow the agenda as much as possible. Schedule follow-up meetings for new project topics not included in the original agenda. The project team meeting should include these points:

• Issues, situations, and information impacting the overall project and project team
• Action items completed since the last meeting
• Status of action items from the last meeting still in progress
• Review of project schedule especially critical path tasks and project milestones
• Action items in queue before next meeting
• Overall project status

Communication between the project manager and project team is the foundation of successfully implementing projects. Although the project manager should interact with the project team daily, a project team meeting is a way to bring the team together to acknowledge project achievements, obtain valuable information, and to work on solving project issues as a project team.

Curtis Clark is a PMP Certified Project Manager with over ten years of experience managing and leading software development and system integration project teams and twenty years of experience in government, banking, mortgage and customer service information services arena.