Status Reviews – Productive or Unproductive?

Review meetings are an integral part of ensuring that work that has been started gets completed as per specifications and on time. Obviously because of so many complexities and dependencies, the work may go beyond the original planned time. Lets go step by step to see what can be done to make the review meetings more and more productive.

Purpose of reviews

The main purpose of reviews is that when you come out of the review meetings, you have enough clarity on what to focus on. Also, it should help the team to increase the completion rate of the action items.

Unfortunately, many status review meetings end up in doing exactly the opposite.

Given below are some of the negative outcomes of status review meetings

• Generally goes beyond the stipulated time.
• Meeting wanders across various topics
• Some topics or people hijack the entire meeting and the agenda goes for a toss
• The rate of action item completion is much less than the rate at which the action items gets added
• Too many things to discuss, too little time
• The target dates keep shifting multiple times.

The action items vicious cycle – The chakravyuh

Lets see how do we get entangled in the “action item chakravyuh (Vicious cycle).

How to break the vicious cycle

To break a vicious cycle, you will have to do at least one thing which is exactly opposite to what you are doing today.

One of the biggest mistake that a reviewer does is to expect that all the action items will be thoroughly discussed. This is never going to happen. In fact, if we try to do that, we will keep getting deeper and deeper in the hole.

So, What should you do – Follow these 4 steps

1) Prioritize and reduce the number of items to be discussed.

2) No new items to be added until a decided number of items are completed and signed off.

3) Park the extra items in a separate list, or flag it in some way so that it will be only discussed when it’s time comes.

4) Keep some room for urgent action items (Please note that this cannot be a norm).

Generally, we all want the team members to come prepared for the review, and they should. But more than that, it’s the reviewer who needs to be much more prepared with the priority list items that needs to be discussed in the meeting. This will give clarity to team members, it will reduce the task switching, and drastically improve the completion rate of the action items

You need to be brave and disciplined enough to resist the temptation of putting everything under the priority list.

Follow the 4 steps, be brave and BREAK THE VISCIOUS CYCLE.