Project management, field crew meetings that work

Words: George HedleyToo often, managers call too many meetings to report on what’s happening without involving the attendees, asking for input, having meaningful discussions, or adjourning with an action plan. In some meetings, the leader rambles along and doesn’t keep the group focused on tasks or priorities at hand. In other meetings, there’s no agenda or structure, and they become free-for-alls without direction or conclusion.

Meetings maximize bottom-line results

Can you imagine a football game without a scoreboard and player statistics to see who is winning and does the best out on the field? Without scorecards and weekly feedback, results don’t matter much to supervisors. Therefore, the meeting leader must create a scorecard tracking system to record each attendee’s performance on every job for all to see every week. This will improve job performance and allow your foreman and supervisors to know, track and hit their goals, rather than work blindly without anything to aim at.

Field crew meetings

Daily crew huddle-up meeting

Can you imagine a football team winning games without calling plays before every down? Get your field crews to gather in a daily huddle if you want your teams to be winners. This is a 10-minute meeting in which everyone stands in a circle first thing in the morning and talks about the upcoming daily targets, goals, activities, progress, production priorities, milestones, needs, conflicts, confusions, schedule coordination, material requirements, equipment needed, availability of tools and deadlines.

Monday morning quarterback crew meeting

Again, just like on every winning football team, every week, the coaches review their teams’ accomplishments, progress, needs, challenges, and areas for improvement, and then decide what they need to do the next week to achieve their winning goals. Then, on Monday morning, they meet with their entire team, review the game plan for the next week, and discuss what needs to be done to make it happen. Every field crew, management team, division or department needs a similar program to get everyone focused on the game plan for the upcoming week.

All superintendents and foremen weekly meeting

Every week, you must get together with all of your field foremen and superintendents to review their individual project progress, goals, results, schedule, activities, manpower, workload, equipment requirements, material needs, subcontractor performance, safety success and customer issues. Each foreman or supervisor reports individually on the project and commits to hitting weekly goals for all to hear. Together, the group will work together to help each other with ideas and suggestions to meet or beat schedules, budgets, safety and productivity goals.

Project management meetings

Project start-up meeting

Before football teams start every game, the coaches have spent many hours mapping out their game plan. They have discussed every possibility for success and failure. Then they decide the best way to execute their plan. In order to build successful projects, the same amount of advanced planning is required by the project management team. The culmination of this project pre-planning is the presentation of the game plan to the project subcontractors and suppliers. This meeting will force your project manager, superintendent and foreman to get together in advance and create a project plan to present to the team.

Weekly project field coordination meeting

This one meeting can improve your overall construction project schedule and completion record by 25 percent or more. By getting every subcontractor and major supplier to attend weekly field coordination meetings held at the jobsite four weeks before they are required to start their work, they become aware of the urgency of the situation. The agenda should review the schedule, progress, milestones and priorities; manpower and crew requirements; field coordination issues, problems and needs; approvals required, shop drawings and finishes; permits and inspections required; jobsite management and cleanup; safety and quality; and customer relationships.

Each of these meetings work, but they may not all be right for your company. Hold regular meetings, and get the full support of your team.
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