I understand the importance of monitoring a project on a consistent basis, but in practice it can be difficult. In the past, I’ve been caught up in larger projects where data collection seems to go through famine-to-gorge gyrations. It’s famine because we tend to avoid collecting until a crisis occurs and then it’s gorge as we over-monitor anything that can be monitored. Then it’s back to famine again when the staff gets so busy reporting that work towards actually finishing the project drops significantly.

In one extreme example, I witnessed a situation where so many status meetings were under way, that we started averaging 3 to 4hrs of non-productive time per staff member, per day! It got so absurd across this one particular portfolio of projects, that this would trigger a periodic shock email from upper-management demanding that all unnecessary meetings cease immediately. And then with one big collective and sheepish sigh of relief, they would cease.

Well what causes this in the first place? I think I know why. The root cause for meetings proliferating out-of-control is the desire of the customer, and even sometimes the vendor, to use each meeting as an opportunity to re-negotiate every little term in the contract. It’s the situation where a contract specifies 12 units to be moved on a Saturday morning, but the customer is going to try and get 15 units moved instead. And then instead of the stipulated once-a-week custom report, it’s the request to get it twice a week instead. And on it goes. This means that every meeting that is simply designed to be an operational or technical meeting now becomes a sales meeting, with everybody having to join to be ready for any possibility of any kind of change. You can’t let that happen. You’ve got to gently keep things focused and there’s a number of things I do to try to mitigate the problem.

One great way is to not have meetings at all for scheduled information gathering and use web based survey tools to collect the data. My favorite (and cheap) tool for doing so is SurveyMonkey.com