Running a weekly coordination meeting with trade foremen
The Wednesday coordination meeting ran ninety minutes and ended with nothing written down. The electrical foreman left early for a delivery, and the painter has not attended in three weeks. On Monday two crews arrived to work in the same stairwell, each sure it was theirs.
A coordination meeting fails when it becomes a round of status reports or a place to settle every argument in public. Foremen stop coming or stop talking, and real coordination moves to conversations nobody records. The City of Los Angeles's engineering bureau shows the discipline needed: its weekly progress meetings follow a set agenda, and the chair is expected to set a responsible party and a time limit for each outstanding item.
- Fix the slot: same day, same time, 45 minutes, the look-ahead on the wall, and the foreman who runs each crew in the room.
- Send the next two weeks the day before, by area, marked with what each trade needs from another.
- Open with safety between trades: next week's overhead work, hot work or shutdowns that put another crew at risk.
- Check last week's commitments: done or not, and why. Follow up the misses later, one to one.
- Walk the two weeks area by area, not trade by trade: who works there, what they need to start, and what they hand to whom.
- Take disputes out of the room. If two foremen cannot agree in two minutes, write down who settles it, with whom and by when, then settle it at the space — see two trades fighting over one space.
- Close by reading back each foreman's commitments: what, where and by which day. Send them the same day — see minutes that create accountability.
The commitments must come from the foremen. In the Lean Construction Institute's weekly work planning, the people who direct the work commit to each activity and the days it will be worked on and completed.
Common mistakes
- Status reports read aloud while everyone else checks their phone.
- Accepting "we'll try" as a commitment.
- Cancelling the meeting in the busiest week, when crews most need each other's plans.
Checklist
Your weekly meeting, in order
- Same day, same time, 45 minutes
- Look-ahead sent the day before
- Safety between trades
- Last week's commitments: done or not, and why
- Next two weeks, area by area
- Disputes: who settles, with whom, by when
- Commitments read back and sent the same day
Check your understanding
Each foreman reports on their own crew in turn, and nobody notices that two of them plan to work in stair 2 on Thursday. What would have caught it, and why?
