Lessons Learned: AM-PM meetings. What you can get in 5 minutes?

We had more than 240 of these meetings over the course of the Big Project. Average meeting time was less than 5-6 minutes. Longest meeting was 11 minutes out of all the meetings we hosted.

Since we had 3 vendors working on the hospital campus, there were a lot of activities happening at the same time. AM-PM meetings worked as quick and easy management tool that kept us connected to the vendors, helped us staying on top of the project. Vendor participation was mandatory. I made a big deal if any vendor representative did not show up on these calls.

AM meeting took place at 7 AM, and PM meetings at 4 PM. Venue was a free conference bridge from Freeconferencecall.com. Vendors were supposed to answer the following short questions and drop off the conference bridge:

AM Meeting questions:

1. What are you going to do today?
2. Where will you be working today? (i.e., which building, floors, etc.). Our client - the hospital - insisted that know where everybody is working on any given day. So this was an important question.
3. Do you have all you need for the plan?

Right after the meeting, Kevin updated the project portal so that all the project stake-holders could check them if they wanted.

PM Meeting questions:

1. What were you able to complete today?
2. If there was a gap in planning vs. execution, what was the reason, and what will be the recovery plan?

We would also discuss any upcoming materials shortage every few days. After doing a few, I handed over the meeting to Kevin who did an excellent job in keeping up.

Besides being free, the cool factor about Freeconferencecall.com, is the automated report of the participants, numbers they called from, and how long they stayed, etc. If I found any vendor missing from the call, I would take a snapshot of the report and sent it to the Senior Program Manager of the vendor. I am not a control freak, but disciplined about certain things:) By the way, this was not a new idea... I used it while I was the Project Manager for the T-Mobile UMTS deployment a few years ago.