How Many Meetings Are Actually Required for the Project? When looking at how to save one project meeting, we need a reference tool that will easily identify how many project meetings would be normal for a successful project. A project requires a couple of set up meetings, a number of regular meetings about detailed issues as well as meetings devoted to the task of reporting the status of project deliverables.

How to count the potential number of meetings?

1. SET UP MEETINGS
Talking about project benefits for customers, about project implementation vision, about project deliverables and project schedule, should require about three meetings for most projects.

2. REGULAR MEETINGS
Depending of specifics of your project, you will need some regular meetings covering the overall status of a project. That could be weekly or daily meetings, which usually take 10 to 30 minutes to talk about the together.

3. DELIVERABLES STATUS
We are going to look at how milestones can be used to track the status of a project. In practice project milestones are important project events that need to be communicated to project team, milestones are not supposed to be an actual work. Milestones represent a change from when the last of deliverable was completed. An example would be manufacturing the fourth wheel of a car, or finished writing of 100th page of a 100 page document. Each deliverable has three statuses which are critical to measuring progress: ready to get started, nearly 80% done, and of course completed. So that means three simple meetings are required during a project's life cycle to check the status states of one milestone.

Approximate number of meetings is SETUP+REGULAR+DELIVERABLES STATUS.

Best practice for using the milestones as a tool to determine project meetings is to schedule the meetings on a Gantt chart. Using the Gantt chart to lay out meetings gives you lots of flexibility in planning and rescheduling of meetings. It is a good idea to use task dependences to save some time at the planning stage by making milestones dependent on task status completion. The ConceptDraw Office suite is very helpful for such purposes.

Follow the steps below:

Step 1. Create project schedule using ConceptDraw PROJECT application.

Step 2. Identify meetings you need for your project and put them all to project Gant chart as milestones.

Figure 1. Scheduling Meeting Milestones with ConceptDraw PROJECT.

Step 3. Convert Gantt chart into a project milestone mind map. Then open it with ConceptDraw MINDMAP.

Step 4. Send milestone mind map to project team and stakeholders.

Figure 2. Creating Project Milestones Mind Map with ConceptDraw MINDMAP.

Summary

It is a common practice that many of the prescheduled meetings can be done quickly and easily, some of these meetings may even be canceled because the need for them disappears as the project progresses. Some of the planned meetings may also take place over more than one meeting. This can happen because during implementation circumstances may vary from what was planned at this project stage. Nevertheless, if you as a project manager have counted the number of meetings required for a project this helps you to be much better organized and assists setting up the proper steps needed to communicate with the project team. Some of the activities that will help you in determining meeting count:

• Count how many meetings have planned during the project life cycle?
• Save meetings: don't do the dead meeting, ask your team: Is it too many or is it enough or is it too short?
• Analyze your steps and count the actual number of your project meetings to properly support objectives.
• Insert meetings into project schedule only when necessary.
• Use Gantt chart to visually show when and what tasks require further discussion and corrective action.
• Use Milestones to determine need for project meetings.

Related Resources

Read How to:

• Identify Project Milestones and Put Them into a Project Gantt Chart
• Convert Gantt Chart to Be a Mind Map of Project Milestones
• Send a Milestones Mind Map to Project Members and Stakeholders

Download Samples used in this article:

• “New Product Marketing Launch” project (use ConceptDraw PROJECT to open it).