Steering Packs

What makes a good steering pack 

The steering meeting is a very important part of any project governance this is your chance as the project manager to formally get direction for your project and approval for your efforts and progress so far.  
It also allows you to align all of the stakeholders, you have many discussions and views during your project lifecycle but this is the opportunity to get everyone aligned.   
  

• Be clear in what you are asking for

Time is likely to be constrained and you will only have limited opportunity to get across what you need, so make it very clear at the start of the pack the key issues and questions that you need to ask and get agreement, if you put this later in the pack the steering group will get distracted by data and probably exhaust the available time on trivial matters rather than confronting the issues you need to address.

• Keep the information clear and concise

The best way to avoid distraction is to keep the information very clear and concise use bullet points with minimal text and try to use pictures and diagrams where possible.

• Ask what the Stakeholders want to see

You can spend hours producing a wonderful pack which you are very proud of, but then you are left doubting if anyone ever actually reads what you have produced, it is definitely not  a weakness to ask a simple question on what your stakeholders want to see in the pack, if you do get the stock answer  "everything is fine as it is", complete the review yourself and start to leave bits out, sometimes the best way to find out what people really want to see is to take something away, then they tend to shout! 

• Get it out nice and early

To give yourself a chance of getting a good productive steering meeting, is to get the pack out nice and early, there is nothing more frustrating than receiving meeting documentation 10 minutes before the meeting is about to start, one of the key benefits of getting the pack out early, is that you can get some early questions/ clarification points raised early this helps you understand the priorities of particular stakeholders and with some quick action potential conflict could be avoided. 
It is also good to get the pack out on a Friday, at the end of the week the number and pace of meetings tends to drop so even if your pack doesn't get read immediately then you stand a good chance of it going into the weekend reading pile.
    

• Show that you are managing hygiene factors

Nobody is denying that plans, budgets and RAID logs are an important part of your project framework but the executive have employed you as a competent project manager and unless you require a decision these should run in the background, include them as an appendix if they are required but you need to again ensure that you don't lose valuable steering time debating if a risk rating is correct or if a milestone should be moved forward or back a day!

• If the sponsor cant attend reschedule

Steering by default has to have the sponsor in attendance, the meeting loses all effectiveness without as the attendees start to speculate on what the sponsor may want to do! If the sponsor cant find the time for Steering or keeps cancelling either find a new sponsor or project!