Project managers sometimes wonder about how often they need to check status on their projects. Unfortunately, what ends up driving the status updates is the schedule of status reports. If your communication plan calls for bi-weekly status reports you end up waiting until just before the status report is due to check in with your project team. This is a great way to get into trouble, because if a problem has developed early in your reporting period, you could have been working to get things back on track for weeks and have lost valuable time.

I propose checking on the moving parts of your project daily, as needed. Use common sense with this, and adjust according to the actual needs of the situation, but I would rather be checking status of key tasks more often than not. These updates can simply be a quick “how’s everything going with …” call, or email, or in-person request. Mix it up to keep your team from getting annoyed. Also, if the task is not very important, or has a ton of slack, you can ease up on your status checks.

One software consulting firm I worked with would hold a daily scrum meeting over IM where we asked everyone on the team these three questions:

1. What did you do yesterday?
2. What are you doing today?
3. Is there anything getting in your way?

I don’t think that level of rigor is required on every project, but it does keep everyone moving forward on the important tasks, and if there is ever a problem, you find out as soon as possible.

I also like to encourage my project teams tell me as soon as an issue arises so we can immediately begin to take the appropriate actions to keep the project on track. In some cultures, this approach doesn’t always turn out to be as easy as you would hope.