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How to Conduct a Review Meeting

Plan for the Meeting

This gives reviewers plenty of advance notice of your need for their services.

1. Schedule the meeting 4 or 5 days after you receive comments, so that you have an opportunity to go through them.

Unless you anticipate significant problems, schedule 90 minutes to 2 hours for a review meeting on a first draft, 1 hour for review meetings on subsequent drafts.

2. In the cover letter sent with the review draft, indicate the date, time, and location of the review meeting. Make sure that you reserve the meeting room before mailing the letter, so that you can actually conduct the meeting in the announced location. (If your organization holds many meetings, finding a meeting room at the last minute can prove challenging.)
3. After reviewing the comments, prepare an agenda. When identifying items to discuss in the meeting, only choose to discuss those review comments:
• About which you have questions or concerns
• About which the reviewers disagreed among themselves
• That you do not intend to incorporate, but feel the need to discuss with the rest of the reviewer
s

You might also indicate a suggested time limit for the discussion of each point so that participants know how time will be spent at the meeting.

If a comment is clear and you intend to incorporate it into the next draft, you do not need to discuss it in the review meeting.

4. Choose a moderator for the meeting. The moderator actually leads the discussion. In most instances, choose someone other than yourself to lead the meeting. You do this so that you can focus your attention on the discussion as well as to ensure that a person with less ownership in the results of the meeting has the responsibility for resolving conflict that might arise. The moderator should be another course designer or developer, or project manager from your organization, rather than a representative of the sponsor.
5. At least 3 working days before the meeting, send a reminder notice and an agenda for the meeting. As part of the agenda, list everyone who is invited to attend and name the person who will be moderating.
6. Make additional copies of the draft to be available at the review meeting, in case they’re needed for reverence.

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Conduct the Meeting

At the review meeting, do the following:

1. As an optional -- but nice -- touch, bring coffee and doughnuts to a morning review meeting; coffee, soft drinks and cookies to an afternoon review meeting.
2. Arrive a few minutes early to make sure that the meeting room is properly set up. Make sure that an agenda is placed at each seat and that audiovisual equipment, if needed, is available.
3. As participants arrive, introduce them to the moderator.
4. The moderator opens the meeting by doing the following:
• Introducing everyone.
• Referring everyone to the agenda, reminding reviewers that comments that you are preparing written responses on their review drafts to comments not on the agenda, and asking if participants have additional items to address.
• Reminding everyone that you, as the course developer, will be taking minutes and publishing them after the review meeting.
• Establishing ground rules for discussion. Decisions are best made by consensus, when everyone agrees to the results.
5. Go through the agenda of the meeting. Trainers Paula Berger and Lynn Harris offer these suggestions for discussing the issues:
• Listen to the reviewers comments, then offer suggestions for making changes.
• Bring controversies to a conclusion; that’s the only way you can resolve them.
• Assign responsibilities and deadlines for resolving issues.
• Maintain your perspective--don’t lose the big picture in details of specific comments.
• Stay "on task;" that is, limit the discussion to the agenda item, do not veer into other subjects.
that do not relate to the discussion. The moderator is responsible for keeping the participants on task.
• Try to keep your sense of humor.
• Observe the time limit for the discussion. The moderator should not go over a time limit without getting approval from all participants.
6. Before moving from one item to the next, quickly recap the resolution to make sure that you have accurately recorded it. If the group cannot resolve an issue or someone needs to conduct some research before resolving an issue, identify who is responsible for resolving the issue and the date they will respond to you with an answer. Otherwise, you will not be able to complete the next draft.
7. Before closing the meeting, review once again the resolutions to the issues.

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Follow-up after the Review Meeting

1. Prepare and distribute minutes of the review meeting within 2 working days. Send a copy to all people who participated in the meeting, as well as reviewers who were not able to attend, and their managers (if appropriate).
2. Follow up on open action items from the meeting within 5 working days to make sure that the issues are resolved before you are scheduled to complete the next draft.

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