Status Meetings Getting You Down?
We’ve all experienced it. Status reports and status meetings that start to become a full-time job of its own. Imagine taking your project teams away from client development projects for an entire day each week or each month so they can prepare status reports for your management team. Not only is this incredibly unproductive, your team may be missing client deadlines and other deliverables in order to create these reports.
As Carl Manello, Practice Director at Trissential, puts it “status reports and status meetings are killing our project teams.” In his post, “All the News that Fits,” Carl discusses how consulting firms are struggling with an abundance of status meetings and reports that sidetrack delivery teams from actual client projects. In some firms, teams are inventing new methods of sharing the data just to provide management with those status reports. Wouldn’t you rather they be spending their time innovating some new methods for clients rather than innovating methods to keep you updated?
While there are many different leadership styles, Manello cites the occurrence of a 160-page status report as an example of how leaders may be substituting status for a lack of day-to-day management and trust of their teams. If this sounds familiar to you, it may be time to consider trying some other options to get the information you need, while also allowing your team to get back to delivering client results.
Some innovative firms are using new technology to solve this challenge. Rather than wasting billable hours on status reports, what if that information could be automatically captured and insights delivered proactively to you? What if you could learn about client issues before they occurred, instead of hearing about them in those status meetings? If consulting software could help save a client relationship, would it be worth giving up your 160-page status reports? It’s not as far-fetched as you may think, and firms are experiencing real improvements to client health, employee productivity, and to their bottom line by letting go of status and embracing transparency.
To learn more about how innovative firms are keeping ahead of the curve, download our ebook: How to Keep Your Consulting Firm’s Client Relationships Ahead of the Curve.
