Schedule Team Meetings or Not?

[Darrell]

Looking for some best practices feedback on how people are handling
project/team meetings. I personally don't think the project schedule should
be used to track meetings. I think the schedule should be used to track
deliverables and material costs. However, other people say the cost of
meetings should be tracked and that the schedule is the best place to do
that. These people have 50 to 100 recurring tasks in their schedules tracking
team meetings on one to two year projects. I haven't used a recurring task in
a long time because they used to mess up the critical path, maybe that has
changed?

What are some of the methods being used to track meetings that could be
considered best practices?

 

[Jim Aksel [MVP]]

I've done it both ways, but prefer to leave Level of Effort (LOE) items out
of the main schedule. Sometimes we have a separate LOE schedule and put
them in there. This is a matter of personal preference depending on how the
Program Management and other customers view the schedule. The standards
(from PMI and ANSI) are silent on this issue. I would like to seem them
push to keep LOE out of the schedules and tracked elsewhere. For example,
if you don't have a team meeting, or file an activity report, is it going to
delay anyone? Of course not, you will not stop the program.

As for critical path corruption, I agree. Long LOE tasks in a schedule
obscure the critical path. One day team meetings on a recurring basis
should be left as "Stand alone" where they are just a group of tasks that
don't drive anything (or are not driven by anything). This will help keep
them off the critical path. The date constratints established by these
tasks may also obscure a critical path if you link to/from the recuring
tasks.

These items can degrade your schedule metrics, however. For example, we
have to report the percentage of tasks without predecessors/successors, etc.
Since the recurring tasks establish tasks with constraint dates (Start No
Earlier Than), and have no predecessors or successors (indeed they are
orphans),then I take a double hit on my metrics.

 

[Darrell]

Jim,

Thx for your input.

I agree that LOE items should be tracked sepearately and not in the project
schedule. Hopefully other will add their oppinions.

Darrell

 

[Dave]

Looking for some best practices feedback on how people are handling
project/team meetings. I personally don't think the project schedule should
be used to track meetings. I think the schedule should be used to track
deliverables and material costs. However, other people say the cost of
meetings should be tracked and that the schedule is the best place to do
that. These people have 50 to 100 recurring tasks in their schedules tracking
team meetings on one to two year projects. I haven't used a recurring task in
a long time because they used to mess up the critical path, maybe that has
changed?

What are some of the methods being used to track meetings that could be
considered best practices?

I wouldn't track them as their duration is generally short and there is
a danger of having too much precision at the cost of no greater accuracy.

For longer meetings where the time spent is significant, I tend to have
a series of tasks such as "Meetings June 08" in order to represent the
work. I break the work up in this way as I don't like having
arbitrarily long tasks.