A weekly review should be the shortest meeting of the week. When it grows past half an hour, people stop preparing and the meeting stops being useful. Here is the agenda we use, which fits in twenty minutes.
Before the meeting (5 minutes, async)
Everyone updates their own items and adds one line: what moved, and what is stuck. No slides. The report page is the agenda.
In the meeting
- Look at the numbers (5 minutes). Read the summary aloud, then only talk about the figures that surprised someone.
- Unblock (10 minutes). Go through the stuck items. Each one gets an owner and a date, or it gets dropped.
- Decide the focus (5 minutes). Pick at most three priorities for the coming week and write them at the top of the page.
Rules that keep it short
- If a topic needs more than two minutes, it becomes its own conversation after the review.
- No status read-outs. If it is in the report, it does not need to be said.
- End on time, every time. Ending early is fine.
Try it for four weeks. Most teams find that the review gets shorter and the Monday mornings get calmer.
Tagged: teamwork