Status Meetings Are Necessary

Well, I'm off to my weekly status meeting.

But, before I go, I wanted to pop in and recommend to everyone that they have a status meeting. Yeah, that's right, most organizations that I work with rarely have status meetings where the developers (or more commonly the dev lead) meet with the project champion or end users.

Before I get too far, let me describe what a project champion is in our environment. A project champion is, essentially, the lead end user. So, the project champion is our (the dev team) main contact in the end user world. There can obviously be many many end users so communicating with all of them is often impossible. A project champion, on the other hand, can be the point of contact and how they communicate the group at large is up to them.

Back to status meetings - I recommend status meetings on any projects that are longer than 3 weeks. Simply pick a date and time (every Thursday at 8am in my case) and bring your project plan and small summary of what it is you have been working on the last week.

Your end users will love you for communicating with them regularly!

UPDATED: I work on a very large project where many people are involved. Face-to-face meetings are not ALWAYS necessary. Status Updates are always necessary (don't want your end user/client to wonder what you are doing), however. Don't want everyone having more pointless meetings than they already do now. =)