Who Needs to Know This?

How many times has this happened to you:

A key task in the critical path of your project is completely out of control.  It’s not getting done, what is done is all wrong, and everything is late.  You go and talk to the person who is in charge of it, and you hear those fateful words, “I didn’t know X, Y, and Z about this project.  When was that said?”  You immediately go back to your desk and add that person to every project meeting to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  In your next project, you vow to not leave anyone off any meetings, because lack of communication causes problems.

Sound familiar?  It’s common in project management- and it’s also the wrong reaction.

How much homework do you do on who should be in each meeting of your project?  I’m going to suggest something that may be sacrilege to many folks:  overcommunication through meetings can damage your project.

Think about it:

• By including people in a given meeting who didn’t need to be there, you are wasting company resources and robbing other projects of available resources.
• By including people in a meeting who doesn’t need to be there, you reduce how engaged that they are in your project.  A few meetings like this, and you will completely loose their attention- which means that they’ll miss details later that you can’t afford them to miss.
• Worse, if they perceive your meetings to waste their time, they will stop coming.
• Even worse than that, their manager might pull *all his resources* out of your meetings rather than waste their time.
• People sitting in the meetings not paying attention will naturally set a bad example to others.  If others in the room are not engaged, your other team members will also become less engaged. 

What can you do to avoid these problems?  Simple:  do your homework before you hold a meeting.  If certain people do not need to be there, be sure to leave them out.  If they missed something that they need to hear, DO NOT tell them through sending out a project status report to the whole team- take the time to send them a note directly.  Trust me, your status report suffers from the same attention problem as your meetings.  Sending a direct note will better draw the team member’s attention.

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