Let’s continue by examining the next three on my list…
Always conduct weekly meetings with the project team
It’s not all about status meetings with the customer. Before that can even happen you need the most up to date information from your team that you can possibly get. To that end, I always conduct weekly internal team meetings 1-2 days in advance of a formal weekly meeting with the customer. That allows me to get status info from each team member, prep everyone for key discussion points during the customer call, and have all the info I need to get the customer a revised project schedule and current status report that will drive that formal weekly discussion. No surprises and a smooth customer meeting is usually the benefit from this effort...