Project Management- Chapter 11 Ideas

Project team members have four major communication needs: responsibility, coordination, status and authorization.
Whether you are assigning work to an individual performer or to a vendor, these following basic rules should be observed:
1. Explain the deliverables.
2. Be clear about the level of effort expected and the due dates.
3. If you know of any obstacles they can expect or special information they'll need, make sure they know it too.
4. Hand out work assignments personally, allowing plenty of time for questions and discussions.
Then kickoff meeting really kicks me off. I like this subject too. A kickoff meeting usually marks the beginning of the execution phase of a project. By this time, the staement of work and project plan have been approved and the team is assembled. It is an opportunity to celebrate initiation of the project.
Project status meeting. A good project status meeting meets a lot of communication needs within the project team. status meetings give the project manager an opportunity to
1. increase team cohesion
2. keep the team informed about project developments from sources external to the team
3. identify potential problems or share solutions to common problems
4. ensure the team understands the progress of the project and works together to determine any neccesary changes to the project plan.
5. make sure that the entire team shares the responsibility of meeting all the project objectives.
In additon to the basic rules for running an effective meeting, the following guidelines are useful for running a project status meeting:
1. be prepared
2. including all the related members
3. use the meeting to disseminate decisions made by management or customers.
4. using the open task report, get the status of every task that should have been started or completed since the last status meetings
5. take advantage of the fact that the entire team is availabale to consider ehat action needs to be taken on any problems
6. don't try to solve problesm that are too big for the meeting or that don't include everyone present.
7. review the readiness for future takes on the OTR.
8. review project logs.