How to run a weekly site coordination meeting

A site coordination meeting exists to solve the problems that sit between parties: work blocked on an answer, a drawing that has changed, a decision only the client can make, two agencies who need the same wall in the same week. Anything one party can sort out on its own does not need the meeting.

What it is not is a status update read out round the table. If each agency spends five minutes saying what it did last week, an eight-party meeting is forty minutes old before a single problem is discussed. Progress can be collected before the meeting; the meeting is for what nobody can fix alone.

• The PMC, who usually chairs. Where there is no PMC, the architect or the client's project manager.
• The architect, for design questions and drawing issues.
• Consultants — structural, MEP, electrical — when their discipline is on the agenda. Not every week by default.
• The contractors and agencies with work in the next two weeks. An agency that starts next month can join next month.
• The client, for the items that need their decision. Schedule those together so they can join for that part rather than the whole meeting.

Small beats complete. Every extra person who is there "just in case" makes the meeting longer for everyone who needs to be there.

Most of a good meeting happens the day before. Circulate the agenda at least 24 hours ahead, with:

• The open actions from the last minutes, each with its owner.
• Open RFIs, oldest first, and which work each one is holding up.
• Drawings issued or revised since the last meeting.
• The decisions the client is being asked to make.

Ask each agency to bring two things only: its look-ahead for the next two weeks, and anything blocking it.

Times will vary with the size of the project. The order matters more than the minutes: unblock work first, then look ahead, then read back.

0–5 min · Last meeting

Confirm the previous minutes. Run through open actions — done, not done, new date.

5–15 min · Blockers and RFIs

Open RFIs, oldest first. For each one: who owes the answer, and by when. Anything blocking work this week comes first.

15–25 min · Drawings

Revisions issued since last week, and anything still waiting to be revised. Confirm everyone is working from the current revision.

25–35 min · Client decisions

Each decision with its options and what is waiting on it. The client joins for this block if not for the rest.

35–42 min · Two-week look-ahead

What each agency starts in the next two weeks, and where one agency's work depends on another's.

42–45 min · Read-back

Read back every action with its owner and due date, and confirm the next meeting.

• Walk the items, not the people. Going round the table invites status reports; going down the agenda keeps the meeting on problems.
• End every item with a decision, an owner and a date — or with an explicit "carried forward" and the reason.
• Take detail offline. When two parties need twenty minutes on one junction, agree who meets whom and when, and move on.
• Let people speak the language they are comfortable in. On many Indian sites one meeting runs in Gujarati, Hindi and English. The chair's job is to restate each decision in one language for the minutes, so nothing is lost in translation.
• Walk to it when the item is a place. Five minutes standing at the problem saves fifteen describing it.

• Issue the minutes within 24 hours, while the meeting is fresh enough for people to correct them. Our construction MoM template is laid out for exactly this meeting.
• Raise the RFIs the meeting identified, each directed to one party with a needed-by date. See our guide to writing an RFI.
• Update the drawing register for any revision the meeting asked for, and issue it with a transmittal.
• Ask each agency to acknowledge its actions.
• Chase the open actions before the next meeting, not at it.

A weekly coordination meeting on a residential project: four people, three languages, 42 minutes. Here is what was said, which part of the agenda it belongs to, what the meeting turned it into and what happened next.

• A status report from every party before any problem is discussed.
• Everyone invited to everything.
• No agenda, so the loudest item wins.
• Decisions with no owner or date.
• The client sitting through an hour of site detail for one decision.
• Minutes written days later, from memory.
• The same items on the agenda every week, with nothing changing.

However well a meeting runs, someone still has to turn it into minutes and work afterwards. Space does that part from the meeting itself.

• Record the meeting in Space, with everyone speaking whatever language they are comfortable in.
• The transcript keeps each speaker separate, in the language spoken, with an English translation alongside.
• Space prepares a summary and the Minutes of Meeting, and suggests the tasks, queries and decisions that came out of it — each quoting the line it came from.
• A person reviews every suggestion and decides whether it becomes work. Nothing is created automatically.
• Months later, the meeting is still there to show why something changed.