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SessionFour004

Sharpening Communication About Project Status and Dynamics
DaveSmith and SteveSmith

Are you fed up with projects that are disjointed and status meetings that go on forever, leaving all the open issues outstanding? Do you wish there was a better way to do and report on your project? Far too often, the members of a project team work in isolation and then silently suffer through weekly status meetings. Too often these meetings reflect the interests of the sponsor and glories unseen from the trenches. If you measured the new ideas gained versus time lost in these meetings, a vast number of people would rate the meeting as a waste of time.

But meeting planners have become "stuck" in a do-and-then-report paradigm, where the doing occupies a certain time and the reporting occupies a different time. Attendance is required; meetings are scheduled for fixed times and places. Perhaps the meeting sponsor basks in the glory of the sequential attentions of n persons and rates the meeting as excellent.

Steve has seen this pattern in company after company. He wants to help equip people with tools for changing how projects are built and statused. Join Dave and Steve to experience a traditional status meeting, discover alternate ways to meet and to affect project status.

• Experience a hierarchical task structure leading to a traditional meeting, versus a less traditional task structure culminating in a non-traditional meeting.
  
• Explore measures of personal and group value for the experience.
  
• Allow individuals to develop alternatives for at least one component of the traditional status meeting.
  
• Explore measures of satisfaction by participants versus observers in the meeting.
  

NotesSessionFour004