How to Conduct a Management Review?
Conducting a management review should be carefully planned. It occurs at a specific intervals throughout the year. The time frame for how often your organisation wants to hold their reviews will be determined by the scope and nature of the organisation. It is recommended that in order to make the meetings more meaningful and manageable, they should be held at least four times a year.
Step 1: Preparation
The first step to conducting a management review is preparation.
This will involve revising the report from the previous meeting, in order to remember whether there was anything to follow-up on, what the goal of the reviews are and any opportunities that could be further looked into.
Once the previous management review has been revised, and the goals for the next one clarified, it is time to conduct the management review.
Step 2: Open the Meeting
The meeting should be opened by informing everyone of the purpose of the review. Nobody wants to sit there confused about why they need to be in the meeting, just because they don’t understand the importance of it.
Set clear goals and expectations that all attendees can relate to.
Once the goals and expectations are set clearly so that everyone can relate to them, it is time to discuss how the management systems have been performing.
Step 3 Review Performance
During this stage, it may be more appropriate for certain employees to run the meeting rather than a Senior Manager doing all of the talking, as they may not have full insights into every department.
This part of the meeting will discuss any challenges that have occurred, whether there have been any audits done, any risks, improvements underway and then review the overall effectiveness of the management system.
Step 4 Close the Meeting
The meeting should come to a close with a future orientated mind-set.
This will focus on having the attendees agree on what opportunities could be delved into, what needs to be mitigated and who is going to be responsible for achieving these tasks.
The date for the next meeting should also be reiterated here, so that all the attendees are on the same page and can prepare for the tasks they have to deal with.
Step 5 Reporting
After the review comes to a close, someone should be responsible for keeping a formal report of the minutes and ensuring this gets filed somewhere it won’t get lost. It would be recommended to save these minutes to some sort of cloud-based system, which all employees have access to. This way, if someone was absent from the meeting, or an employee simply wants to go back over what they were assigned, they can easily find these documents and do so.
