Project meetings are essential tools for preparing, monitoring, and controlling a project. There are big meetings including all project partners and small meetings within working groups – however, preparation, organization, and performance of meetings follow similar rules. Most important is to prepare the expected results in advance.

As soon as the project plan is settled, the team has to be recruited. This module outlines selection criteria for project manager, core project team members, and additional contracted team members. The project manager has to define how

• The project team operates
• And how communication works within the project team.

As soon as the project has started, the baseline is the original project plan. The project manager’s tasks are to

1. Keep track of the project progress using a reporting system
2. Identify deviations from the project plan
3. Take controlling actions as a response to deviations from the project plan.

Tools for an efficient reporting system are milestone trend charts, Gantt charts, and tables on the level of concrete personnel resources.

Changes happen all the time, either by additional requirements of the project requesters or simply by things going wrong. This is the big challenge for a project manager, to be addressed by several types of controlling actions.

Before you proceed with the following module, please answer the self-test questions for this module, implemented on the e-Learning platform.