Weekly meetings are a crucial part of successfully executing construction projects. They are an essential opportunity to come together as a team, improving every week as you march toward your goal of project completion. In this section, we’ll review the five simple steps for an effective weekly meeting: prepare, review, plan, look ahead, and pin. Following this process will drive planning improvement, helping your team to take their planning to the next level. Let’s get started!
Preparation: Update last week’s tickets prior to the meeting
Everyone should come to the weekly meeting prepared – every completed task should be updated with a status, whether it was done early, on time, or late. It’s more efficient to spend time collaboratively solving current project problems than to discuss completed tasks from last week. Last week’s work will be in the Current Period, which is the area highlighted in green in the plan.
Keys to Success: Open the Current Period in your Plan by clicking on the green bar on the timeline.
All of the completed tasks from the past week (in the Current Period) should have their statuses updated. Updating pinned task tickets is one of the most crucial responsibilities that project members have. Users have four update options:
- Completed as Planned/On-Time: marked with a green pin
- Completed Early: marked with a blue pin
- Completed Late: marked with a red pin
- Rescheduled/Replanned: marked with a red pin
Identify finished tasks that still have black pins, if there are any. Work with the project members to get the statuses updated, and remind the project members to do this before coming to the meeting.
Meeting Structure: There are four easy steps to an effective weekly meeting:
- Review last week’s plans to find opportunities for improvement.
- Plan the upcoming week and review handoffs so everyone can commit to the schedule.
- Look ahead at future work to identify, discuss, and manage potential obstacles.
- Pin down all tasks for the upcoming week to track how well your team is planning.
Review: Review last week’s plans to find opportunities for improvement.
The best teams (Admins and Basic Users) start their weekly meetings by reviewing how well they executed their plans last week. They look at what went right or wrong and they apply lessons learned to the upcoming week. Go through any tasks that didn’t go according to plan. Misplanned tasks will be easy to identify because they will have red (late), blue (early) or black (unfinished) pins. You can quickly go through each of these early and late tasks by clicking on the pin to see the reason it didn’t go according to plan.
Example: A handoff between the plumber and electrician in a specific area of the job site hit a snag with coordination. The plumber underestimated the amount of time their task would take to finish and the electrician’s team showed up unable to start their work. As a result, work was pushed out an entire day.
Tasks that were completed early are equally as important to identify as late tasks. When a task is finished earlier than expected, that area of the job site becomes idle when another user could have been working there. If a user is consistently completing their tasks earlier than expected, you’ll want to talk to them about sandbagging before it becomes a bigger issue.
Plan: Plan the upcoming week and review handoffs so everyone can commit to the schedule.
After the team has reviewed last week’s planning performance, you’ll start scheduling the upcoming week’s worth of work. Apply lessons learned from the previous week’s mistakes as you plan this week’s work. Whoever is in charge of completing the upcoming tasks should be participating in this meeting (i.e. foremen). Confirm that all of the tasks for the upcoming week are scheduled correctly in the Next Period, the area highlighted in blue in the plan.
Examples of questions to ask your teams before you Promise the tickets:
- Are the tasks the correct duration?
- Do any of the tasks need to be rescheduled or reorganized? Why?
- Are perits in place?
- Is there enough labor available
- Will material or equipment arrive on time?
- Do we need to reschedule any tasks because of these (or other) issues?
- Have lessons learned from last week been incorporated?
The basic users should talk through their work and organize the plan together, reviewing key handoffs. Everyone will be held to the final schedule that’s built in the Next Period. The entire group should verbally agree on the schedule of work for the upcoming week.
Look Ahead: Look ahead at future work to identify, discuss, and manage potential obstacles.
As a team, review the next six week’s worth of work to identify obstacles that could potentially hold up future tasks.
Example: You have identified an upcoming task in six weeks that requires an RFI response. By detecting the constraint, there’s plenty of time to follow up on the RFI before the task is impacted.
Start developing a plan to address constraints in the plan earlier so they don’t hold up future tasks. You may discover unplanned future constraints – be sure to add them to the schedule. Now that your constraints have been added to the look ahead schedule, open up the constraint log and sort by planned date with the most recent finish date.
Look ahead to give your team another opportunity to review and identify future constraints – this will ensure constraints are resolved and that no tasks are in danger of being unnecessarily held up. Based on the constraint discussion, adjust any tickets or constraints as needed.
Tip: In the Constraint Log, open up the relevant to see their detail. Update the status of the constraint by checking it off as complete or making a note to track the progress. If any new constraints are identified, be sure to add them to the plan.
Pin: Pin down all tasks in the upcoming week to track how well your team is planning.
The final step in a well-executed weekly meeting is pinning down all of the tasks that you’ve scheduled for the upcoming week. By pinning tasks, the whole team is committing to the schedule and tracking any changes. To pin the upcoming week’s worth of work, move the blue shaded Next Period to include the upcoming seven days (use the white arrows to click and drag this area on the timeline to adjust). In your weekly meeting, make sure that all the tickets in the upcoming seven days are scheduled where they should be. Then click Promise Now, the Next Period will be shifted out a week and the upcoming weeks’ worth of work will be locked down by pins in the green shaded Current Period. Now, all users will have to report any variation in their tasks for the upcoming week of work.