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Eliminate meeting time by utilizing progress reports and making phone calls for clarification only.

COST: Most of the time, this option makes the meeting and travel time cost zero since people are only writing and reading. Some may argue that there is additional time in writing and reading the progress reports. However, this might not be true since the staff members would have had to prepare notes or slides for presenting in a meeting anyway. Their time is merely focused towards putting those same notes into a standard format. As to time savings for the manager, they most likely can read the progress reports faster than the time they would have spent preparing for a meeting and listening to the presentations.

BENEFIT: Asking staff members to provide weekly progress reports, gives the manager the same information he would obtain from their briefings in meetings. It frees the manager’s valuable time to be spent on higher priority items and frees their staff to get more work done. Additional time savings for the manager might occur if they are required to provide higher-ups with their team progress on projects. The manager can copy key data from individual progress reports and paste it into their own progress report or presentation.

IMPROVEMENT: To make progress reporting effective, the manager must provide a standard format for staff members to use. This format must tell them what categories of data to provide and give limits related to the numbers of items per category. The limits will force the individuals to put only top priority projects and issues onto the reports. The progress reports can then be sent to the manager via email or placed on a department server where the manager may access them. The second option is better for managers who travel and get email on their PDA or phone, as this limits email numbers and size they receive. If staff members have detailed data they think the manager may need in order to understand their report, they may include it as an email attachment or as an active link in their report on the server.