Committee and Steering Meeting Preparation
Prepare your management committees and steering meetings with clear, concise, and decision-oriented briefing materials.
The night before the committee, twenty spreadsheets to reconcile
The night before a steering committee, the project lead or executive assistant pulls together reporting from each site or business unit, often spreadsheets that do not follow the same template twice, last month’s meeting notes, and alerts sent in by email. All of it gets consolidated late in the day, sometimes late in the evening, so the pack is ready by the next morning.
A tidy pack can still say nothing
We regularly see automatically generated packs that stay tidy and well formatted while saying very little: they repeat last month’s structure, line up the same indicators in the same order, and miss the one topic that needs to lead this month because a site has fallen behind schedule or a client has threatened to walk. Management ends up rewriting the priorities itself, and the time saved on formatting is spent again on review.
Consistent sources, a starting condition
We only take this on if the sources, reports, indicators, meeting notes, follow a stable format from one month and one site to the next; otherwise the system spends more time interpreting files than extracting anything from them. We also need someone in management to have already set the committee’s priorities: without that hierarchy, the system can only lay topics out in a neutral order, which amounts to not deciding at all.
Management still writes the agenda
We consolidate the sources, highlight the gaps and indicators worth commenting on, and produce a pack structured against the agenda. Management then adjusts the emphasis to fit what has actually happened since the last meeting and what needs deciding this time, and it is management that settles, in the end, what actually gets put to the room.