Informing the status of the project to upper management regularly and getting its advice to solve the project s major issues go a long way during project execution.

Monthly status meetings are recommended. These meetings should cover schedule-performance and cost-performance indices for every task group, good news about the project, major issues and their solutions, customer s overall project status, and upcoming milestones. If an upper manager cannot make it to the monthly status meeting, meet one-on-one with him or her. Similar monthly status meetings should be held with the upper managers of international project sites. Document-controlled meeting minutes also should be distributed to all the involved upper managers.

Another type of upper management meetings are emergency meetings related to the project. For timely risk management, these emergency meetings can be held at short notice if there is a quorum. You should always go to these emergency meetings with concise description of the issue at hand and proposed solutions. Document-controlled emergency meeting minutes also should be distributed to all the involved upper managers.

Always invite the involved upper managers to important customer meetings, your team s project celebrations, patent certificate award meetings, project ending meetings, etc.

Sometimes, an upper manager can interfere with your project and try to pull the design that your team members are working toward by what he or she thinks is the best approach. If such circumstances occur, talk to the interfering upper manager, listen to him or her, and propose a team meeting along...