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I like Linda's target of zero meetings, but we have one a week. However, on a large project I worked on, we had daily meetings and that's a feature of the agile daily standup as well (my project did not use agile methodologies).
Hi...First you need to understand what do you mean by 'meeting'?
There isn't one rule of thumb here. There are many factors that you need to keep in mind. Some examples: 1. Status meetings - They primarily can be collected through various methods like one on one chat, email status, wikis..If you still want to have status meetings, then just keep it brief and strictly to the point. Bear in mind this will be dependent on how the team likes to operate.Less experience consultants would require frequent interactions compared to experience consultants. 2. Steering committee meeting - I like to keep it milestone based. But depending on the need which you might have picked up during the creation of communication plan you would like to follow that. Suggestion: Meetings should be a forum to speak and listen rather than one side talking. Meeting participants should feel actively engaged or else they might not turn up or show reluctance during the next meetings. I like to keep meetings very short, to the point, and agenda circulated in advance so everyone knows why they are coming to the session. Meeting minutes need to follow after the end to ensure all action items are captured and tracked. Hope my response helps. 
I believe that the goal of "no meetings" is for very mature PMOs, and maybe not even that way, because it is easy to have no meetings in the project and find out in the ending that everything went south because someone didn't share some key information, and on a large project with many people this is not that hard. As our colleagues wrote, we must have different types of meetings, each for a purpose. In my opinion the most important is to check for risks at the status meetings. Also, I'd rather spend more time in planning meetings than "problem solving" meetings.
As others said it depends on type, size, scope and timeline and sometimes specific constraints of the project, but also on team setup. Esp. in dislocated or international teams I've experienced a need of regular, weekly meetings to get in sync. These meetings are for information, if issues raised they have to be discussed/solved separately, documented and part of the information in the next meeting.
For specific stakeholder meetings (e.g. with customer, finance department) a monthly meeting is sufficient, if no other circumstances require a different sequence. 
Weekly, with additional ad-hoc if necessary. With an exposed Project Site on SharePoint, it is recommended discussions go there. Its centralized, can be seen by the team, and a good way to keep the momentum, especially with members dispersed globally.
Rolf Dieter Zschau
Business Analysis & Solution Lead| Volkswagen Group Charging GmbH
Unterschleissheim, Germany
Jun 22, 2016 1:38 PM
Replying to John Herman
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It depends on the project. And what kind(s) of meetings. Team meetings, meetings with sponsors or steering committees, meetings with vendors? For complex projects, you may need multiple meetings per week. Agile/Scrum would say you need a scrum each day or two. And large IT projects often have part-time team members for database, network, OS, security, etc. These people don't have time to meet every day. Maybe you meet with them once a week, or once every two wks. You need to meet the expectations of the sponsor/steering committee, so meet with them on a schedule that they approve. But at the project and team level, you need to determine the best frequency. Input from the team can be helpful.
I totally disagree with Linda in a globally aim of Zero meetings. But it depends what you mean with "Meetings", of course. And it's very important to manage and moderate meetings appropriately to audience, target and time setting. I agree with Linda, that meetings should be restricted and minimized but that doesn't mean "no meetings" but "appropriate meetings" with appropriate audience. |
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