Reviewing Progress

Getting the team together is costly in both time and resources, but well-run review meetings are an essential ingredient in any project, offering you the opportunity to check past progress and confirm future direction. They also renew people’s identification with your project team.

Keeping track of progress

An effective review meeting should be one part of a continuous cycle of activity. Prior to every meeting, each team member should work toward completing their tasks, and if they fail to do this within the set timeframe, noncompletion should be reported to you. Use this information to formulate and circulate an agenda for the review meeting, with minutes of the last meeting attached as preparatory reading. At the meeting, start by discussing progress since your last review, then make decisions about what tasks need to be completed before the next time you meet. Delegate specific actions to individuals. Record these actions in “Action minutes,” which should be circulated as soon after the meeting as possible to give people the best chance of completing their tasks prior to the next meeting.

Running successful reviews

Table

Fast track	Off track
Sending the agenda for the meeting in advance	Holding ad-hoc review meetings with no preparation
Ensuring that agenda items run to schedule, without being rushed	Allowing the discussion to wander and side issues to dominate
Allocating action points to attendees with agreed to deadlines	Assuming that everyone will know what they have to do
Finishing with a discussion about what has been learned for next time	Accepting excuses without discussing how things can change

Preparing to chair a review meeting

• Are you up to date with all aspects of your own project work? (If your project work is behind schedule, you won’t have the authority to chase others for theirs.)

• Do you know who will be there and how they are doing with the tasks they have been set?

• Have you set aside extra time so that you can arrange the room and set up equipment before other people arrive?

• Are you feeling calm? (If you are stressed, this is likely to rub off on other people.)

• Are you prepared to challenge people who have not done what they are committed to, or who are behaving in a disruptive manner?

Scheduling review meetings

Review meetings can be scheduled as a regular event—at the same time of every day, for example, or on the same day of every week or month. Alternatively, the meetings can be fixed to the expected delivery date of certain products or to stages of the project. Both of these approaches have their strengths and weaknesses: regular meetings in the same place and at the same time are more prone to “game playing” and a lack of concentration among attendees, but meetings set by the delivery dates of your project are more difficult to schedule to ensure that everyone can attend.