Steering committee: the weekly deck without losing your evening

The steering committee is the most regular meeting in the life of a project, and the deck that prepares it is the one you redo most often. Every week or fortnight, the same questions: where are we, what slipped, what must be decided, what do we need. And every week, the same evening spent updating twenty slides, eighteen of which changed by three figures.

What the sponsor really expects

A steering committee is not an information meeting. The sponsor and the directors in the room are not there to learn the project but to arbitrate it. They expect three things, in this order: an immediate reading of the project's health, the list of decisions that fall to them, and proof that the team masters what it is saying.

What the deck too often does: tell the story of the week. What it should do: present the gap between plan and actual, then ask.

The structure that does not move

The strength of a good steering deck is that it is always the same. Participants know where to look, compare from one session to the next, and spot immediately what changed. A proven structure fits in eight slides.

Project weather: one overall indicator, three per workstream, one line of summary. Decisions expected, first and not last, because they are the point of the meeting. Progress by workstream, planned versus actual. Budget, spent and forecast. Risks, with their movement since the last session. Blocked items, with the name of the person who can unblock them. Next steps at two weeks. Appendices, which are not presented.

That structure is a template in the literal sense: fixed layouts, areas waiting for figures and short sentences. It is exactly what makes it automatable.

What changes every week, and where it comes from

The figures come from three or four sources: the schedule, the budget tracker, the risk register, the action log. They already exist, in files the team maintains anyway. The project manager's job is not to produce them but to lay them out, and that is where the evening goes.

The text changes less than you think. The summary and the decision requests are the only parts that need real writing. Everything else is an update.

Three practices that give the evening back

Fill the structure, never redraw it. This week's deck is last week's deck with the figures replaced. Any change of structure is a separate decision, taken once a quarter.

Have the slides produced from the tracking files. An exported dashboard, a risk register, a schedule: given as input to a tool that can read a template, they become the corresponding slides in minutes, in the project's brand or the client's.

Keep your time for the two slides that matter. The weather and the decisions expected. Those are the ones the sponsor will read, and the ones nobody else can write in the project manager's place.

For multi-client projects

Consulting firms and integrators have an extra problem: every client wants its steering deck in its own brand. The same content, the same structure, three different templates. It is the exact case where a tool that composes in the client's template, rather than the provider's, saves the most time.

Paul was built for that: you import the client's or the project's template, it reads the layouts, and at every session you hand it your tracking files and your two paragraphs of summary. It composes the deck in the structure, you review, you export to .pptx. The reporting page shows the flow on a figures-heavy report, and the free trial runs on your own files.