Meetings are the backbone of a project. They hold the whole project together. Meetings can break a project, or make a project very successful if used efficiently and decisively.

Project kickoffs, design reviews, risk management, buy-ins, project status presentations, team communications, customer milestones, subcontractor milestones, etc., all require domestic, international, or virtual meetings. These can be team meetings, subgroup meetings, individual team member meetings, fun and morale-boosting team get-togethers, customer meetings, subcontractor meetings, and upper management meetings. Meeting preparation, meeting management, meeting minutes format, and meeting minutes document control and distribution should all be standardized at the planning phase of a project.

Sometimes you might have to dodge the standard meeting methods. For example, if you want to call an emergency meeting, you might have to go to every member s office and invite him or her to a verbal agenda meeting, instead of going to a formal, say, MS Outlook, meeting organizer. On the other hand, periodic meetings, customer meetings, subcontractor meetings, and upper management meetings should be properly prepared, and the people involved informed well ahead of time, and executed according to a pre-published meeting agenda. If in a meeting a subject is allocated a certain duration, and if the meeting runs over that duration, reschedule another meeting to finish that particular subject. Meetings cost projects a lot of time and therefore money. Inefficiencies in meetings are a given fact. These meeting inefficiencies can affect the schedule and cost of the project tremendously. Therefore, meeting control...