How to Hold a Productive Monthly Project Review Meeting
That Doesn’t Make You Want to Pull All Your Hair Out
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Ok, real talk.
It’s frustrating for project managers when their team doesn’t deliver on time.
It’s frustrating for stakeholders that the product is not where it needs to be.
It’s frustrating for the organization to find itself in a slow-growth situation with no end in sight.
And it’s really, really frustrating for project managers to have to lead these meetings every month.
If you’re like me, you’ve attended your fair share of meetings where people have just sat there and stared at each other for 30 minutes non-stop, emotions boiling.
And as a project manager, one of your most important responsibilities is ensuring that the team is making efficient use of their time, and you’re on track to meet your deadlines. That means that monthly status meetings need to be run as efficiently as possible — and let’s face it, they usually aren’t.
It seems like every time you hold one, there’s some new drama, someone will tell you about how they can’t move forward with project X until they hear back from vendor Y (even though it wasn’t on the agenda), or someone else will waste the entire meeting complaining about how they don’t have the resources they need to get anything done.
At the end of each meeting, you’ll feel like you’ve wasted an hour of your life and learned nothing useful from all that yakking.
Is it possible to hold a monthly progress review meeting without losing your mind?
It sure is.
In this post, I’ll show you a super-simple structure for making sure that each monthly meeting really does add value — and doesn’t make you want to pull all your hair out in frustration.
I’ve held a lot of meetings in my career. Some were extremely productive. And some were, well, less so.
The difference? — agenda and structure..
