Don't ever hold "status" meetings? I disagree.

"Use the right tool at the right time." Status meetings are good for making sure people's feet are held to the fire. It's amazing how motivating it is to have your milestones be done on time you know that a missed deadline will mean looking bad in front of many peers.

The best status meetings I've been involved with coordinated with an MS-Project or similar list of milestones. The moderator reads out the name of each milestone, and the stucky reports a percent complete. If they are halfway through their allocated time for a milestone and their percent complete isn't about 50, we stop to find out why. Management then figures out if they have to apply the "management rule of 3" -- managers are powerless to do more than allocate one of 3 things: time (adjust the deadline), features (delete features), or resources (add more people).

It's also important to have these meetings so that when people miss deadlines the stakeholders can all be in the room to work out contingency plans right away.

Even with a good status meeting there are two things to watch out for:

-- Too many people. A status meeting should have only a key contact from each part of the project. The minutes should be distributed widely.

-- People that don't realize a status-meeting is for giving status, not solving problems. I'm always careful to put "STATUS MEETING" in the subject: line of any email reminders about such a meeting. That way when people start problem-solving (usually 2 people, who are now wasting the time of n-2 people in the room) I can cut them off by reminding them that it is a *status* meeting, not a meeting for problem-solving. Thus, they can work out when they will meet off-line and email their results to the larger group. Often they can stick around after the meeting and solve the issue right then and there, or stay a little longer on the teleconference line. That saves one round of scheduling.

Tom