5 Must-Have Project Management Meeting Agenda Components

When someone uses a project management meeting agenda, it’s obvious—they stay on topic, calls never run late, and everyone leaves with a clear understanding of the next steps.
Discover how to improve your project status meetings with these handy project meeting agenda templates.

• What’s a project management meeting agenda?
• How to prepare for a project management meeting
• 5 key elements of a project management meeting agenda
• Free project management meeting agenda templates
• Enjoy increasingly productive meetings with Fellow

What’s a project management meeting agenda? 

A meeting agenda clearly outlines topic touchpoints and key details, like attendees and the date. It might also include previous action items worth checking in on and links to relevant documentation the team might view beforehand or review during the call. 
Project managers (PMs) orchestrate many moving parts when organizing a project, like budgets, resources, and external stakeholder expectations. And they’ll often meet with several teams in a single call—especially if they’re managing more than one project. Encouraging your PMs to optimize these agendas helps them keep the meeting on track.

How to prepare for a project management meeting

Meeting agendas help PMs prepare, and sharing them ahead of time ensures everyone involved understands the meeting’s goals and expected outcomes. This clarity reduces confusion, misunderstandings, and frustration from attendees whose presence may be unnecessary.

Here’s how to prepare attendees for different project management status calls:

1New projects

New initiatives prompt thoughtful questions and excitement. PMs can prepare to effectively field queries and stoke initial interest by:

• Choosing icebreakers: Icebreakers are a great way to boost comfort levels, making teammates feel comfortable sharing ideas and concerns. A virtual team-building activity or game helps get everyone involved if you’re meeting remotely.
• Crafting the project’s vision: The team needs a clear yet flexible vision to rally around. This establishes a baseline that defines important details, like the project’s target audience and how it impacts the organization.
• Anticipating flexibility: People are more invested in plans they helped shape than ones they’re forced to follow. Motivate PMs to listen to team input when crafting the agenda, timelines, and action items.

2In-flight projects

Once a project is in full swing, the team has committed to a working style, timeline, and output expectation. Now, it’s the PM’s responsibility to track progress and address roadblocks.

Here are some tips for PMs preparing for in-flight project status updates:

• Use a living document: Keep a running document that’s added to every meeting so relevant action items and talking points carry over.
• Set the pace: Incorporate expectations for how long each talking point should take to encourage people to stay on schedule. And assign action items with deadlines so attendees understand their responsibilities and time constraints.
• Stay consistent: Use a standard meeting structure that hits the same categories in the same order every time. This way, team members know how to prepare and when to contribute.

5 key elements of a project management meeting agenda

PMs have their own styles for running meetings—and that autonomy is important. But here are five components every agenda should include.

1 Summary

Include a summary at the top of the agenda outlining what the team will discuss in concise, general terms. A summary for a regular check-in might go like this:

Checking in on action items and objectives to determine if we’re on track to meet deadlines. Also, let’s put our heads together on when to loop in marketing. Lastly, we’ll discuss potential financial roadblocks to get ahead of them before they slow down progress.

2Objectives

Objectives are the primary milestones the project needs to meet upon completion. This list carries over from one meeting to the next, slowly dwindling as teams check off items. 

Here’s an example of an objectives list for a website improvement project:

Objectives: 

• Create a branch
• Add support for a new feature
• Create designs
• Update CSS
• Update pages
• Test
• Merge

3Action items

Action items are the individual tasks that lead to completing larger objectives. PMs assign each item to a specific team member, and teammates discuss progress in status update calls. 

If a team’s current objective is “Create minimum viable product,” their action items might look like this:

Action items (~10 minutes discussion time):

• Create wireframes: John
• Conduct user research: Jane
• Edit product to address research results: Rob

4Roadblocks

Perhaps the most important part of project status meetings is addressing challenges—or getting teammates unstuck. Teams chat about new and outstanding roadblocks and problem-solving to find a way out without overusing resources or delaying the project. 

Here’s an example roadblocks list:

Roadblocks (~10 minutes discussion time):

• Our team’s Figma license needs renewal
  • Requisition sent (6/12)
  • Reminded (6/20)
• The budget for retranslating pages needs approval
  • Meeting with finance on 7/1
• The new transcription feature is broken
  • Dev is working on it as of 6/14

5Deadlines

PMs can keep due dates top-of-mind by listing them beside action items, objectives, and individual task lists. You might also ask managers to highlight upcoming and late deadlines in yellow and red, respectively.

Free project management meeting agenda templates

Over time, teams discover what they need most from project update calls. But experienced and beginner PMs know that a thoughtfully crafted template is a great starting point. Here are several free Fellow templates that cover various use cases:

• Project Kick-Off Meeting Agenda Template: An initial evaluation of a project’s goals, purpose, and scope aimed at creating a solid starting point for the team.

• Project Status Meeting Agenda Template: A recurring check-in of a project’s current state, including space for a summary, action items, and roadblocks.

• Project Check-In Meeting Template: An in-flight status update covering small wins, past action items, updates, issues, questions, and current action items. 

• Project Review Meeting Agenda Template: A retrospective look at how a project went, what the team learned, and how they can improve their process moving forward.

Enjoy increasingly productive meetings with Fellow

Agenda templates are just the start—Fellow offers a full-stack suite of tools designed to improve team meetings. 

Try Fellow’s Meeting Copilot, an AI-powered feature that takes detailed notes and shares post-call action item lists and meeting overviews. And Fellow’s auto-generated agendas offer your team more cohesive, comprehensive, and team-specific meeting outlines. 

Plus, Fellow integrates with popular project management platforms like Asana, Linear, and Monday.com so project-related documents can all be brought into your meetings—and everything’s always synced and updated. 

Sign up for free today and introduce Fellow to your team tomorrow.