Gate Meetings and Project Status Reports

Hello PM Hut,

Your Articles are very useful and interesting to all Planners. I will try to give a copy to my Project Manager and let him read about it.

Thank you & More Power..


Arnold

Dear Sir/ Madam (PM Hut),

Thank you for your article about the Project Status report. It is directed toward creating a brief summary of the project. This is what the Executive Summary in the Monthly report should contain.

Please allow me to add, that if the Planner is trying to create a Monthly Status report, then it should be more comprehensive.

These segments are a must in each Monthly status report:

Scope:
I. Engineering (Material and Shop Drawings)
II. Procurement
III. Construction
IV. Commissioning and Testing

Cost:
I. Invoicing
II. Extra Work
III. Variations

Time:
I. Approved schedule with Critical Path
II. Actual progress with updated Critical Path
III. Delays and reasons for delays

The status report should address each issue above in addition to list all the following:

1. Minutes of Meeting
2. The following logs:
a. Correspondence sent and received
b. Non Conformance Recrods Issued
c. Material submittals status Log
d. Shop Drawings status Log
e. Procurement Log
f. Invoicing, insurance and guaranttees Summary
g. Request for Information
h. Confirmation of Verbal Instructions
i. Daily reports
3. Manpower summary
4. Outstanding Issue and Recommendations

Thank you again for your excellent article.

Samer

For Project Status Report(s), I supposed the number one rule to follow is to tell the truth (facts), supported by mathematically calculated figures.

PM Hut

Reading your article "Conducting Successful gate meetings" , gave me the opportunity to carefully review the various Gate meetings that we execute in house.

Being involved in Oil&Gas, Chemicals projects the Gate meetings have a different purpose, importance and time execution.

The most important gate meetings are executed at early project stage. The two main aims are: to ensure the quality (technical) of END deliverables and to identify/mitigate risks.

Early project stages for us are: conceptual and feed or basic engineering. During these phases we identify the key deliverables and perform the meetings in order to identify End quality problems, which usually have to be repaired with a lot of effort in the next phase.

During these phases the gate meeting attendees are external quality reviewers to the project. Some key project team members are invited, but the review will be lead by Company expert reviewers (normally senior specialist).

The most important gate meeting is the one executed at the end of the project phase which is opening the door for the bulk execution.

Cheers,

Thank You each & every one for your reply!

Samer your reply is a nice addition to the article. Would you be interested in posting this information as a comment on the Project Status Report article? This will certainly be very helpful to fellow Project Managers.

Carmen I can see a short article on the Gate Meetings specific to your industry. Would you care to write one (I will definitely publish it if you do)? In case you decide on doing so, then please contact me (through the Contact Us form on PM Hut) and we’ll take it from there.

Now I have chosen a very popular and light article on PM Hut for your reading pleasure: Do You Speak Project.