Weekly RAID review

Twenty to thirty minutes. Same slot every week. Owners in the room, not just the project manager.

Open Table view, sort by Impact, and work down. That is the agenda. Do not build a separate slide deck for this, because the moment the review needs preparation it starts getting skipped.

Running order

1. New entries (5 min) Anything raised since last week. Confirm the category, the owner, the impact and the due date. An entry that leaves this meeting without an owner and a date has not really been raised.

2. Critical and High impact (10 min) Open the 🔥 Escalate now sublist. For each entry, one question: what has changed since last week?

Three answers are acceptable. It moved, here is how. It did not move, here is what is blocking it. It is done, close it.

"Still working on it" is not an answer, it is the absence of one.

3. Waiting on someone else (5 min) Open the ⏳ Waiting on someone else sublist. For each entry, name who chased it and when. If nobody chased it, that entry did not move because of the project, not because of the other team.

4. Triggers (3 min) Any risk whose trigger condition has been met, or is close. A trigger that fired means the risk is now an issue. Move it, and say so out loud, because that is exactly the moment teams tend to go quiet.

5. Escalations (2 min) Decide what goes up this week. Bring three things per escalation: what will happen, what it costs, what decision you need. An escalation without a specific ask turns the steering committee into an audience.

Rules that keep it to thirty minutes

• Do not review closed entries. They are recorded, they do not need discussion
• Do not re-explain entries for whoever missed last week. Point them at the description afterwards
• Do not solve problems in the room. Identify the owner, agree the next step, take the debate offline. This is the rule that keeps reviews short, and the hardest one to hold
• Update Last Reviewed on everything you touch. It takes two seconds and it is the field that exposes neglect a month later

After the meeting

Update statuses while the conversation is fresh. A review whose outcomes are written up on Monday is a review that half happened.

If any entry moved to Escalated, message the escalation owner the same day. Escalation loses most of its value in transit.

A note on tone

The review works when people can raise uncomfortable things without it being read as blame. A team that only logs safe risks has a RAID log that reports on how the project feels rather than how it is.

The quickest way to build that: when someone raises something awkward, thank them for it in front of everyone, then move straight to what happens next.