A steering committee that turns into a passive slide deck review is pointless. Its only reason to exist: getting decisions made that the project manager can't make alone.
The steering committee (COPIL in French) periodically brings together the sponsor, key stakeholders, and the project manager to validate progress, arbitrate strategic decisions, and unblock what the project team can't resolve alone: extra budget, priority trade-offs, approving a scope change.
Unlike a weekly team meeting, the steering committee isn't for tracking task-level detail — it's the level where decisions the project manager doesn't have authority to make alone actually get made. The APM (Association for Project Management) ranks this kind of governance among the factors most correlated with success on large projects.
An overall indicator (On Track / At Risk / Off Track) and milestones crossed since the last meeting — see the status report.
Risks from the risk matrix that need a committee decision, not just information.
The heart of the meeting: every topic arrives with a clear recommendation from the project manager, not an open problem with no proposal.
What's planned before the next meeting, and who owns each action decided today.
Golden rule: never bring a problem to the steering committee without a recommendation. A committee discovering a topic with no proposal spends the meeting debating instead of deciding.
The steering committee isn't the place to discuss task-by-task progress.
A meeting that ends with no written decision was pointless — log and circulate every trade-off made.
Too frequent, it becomes a formality; too rare, decisions arrive too late to be useful.
Without a sponsor who actually decides, the meeting turns into a plain information session.
The PMI treats project governance (steering committees included) as a determining success factor, on par with execution quality.
Status, risks, and milestones generated from your real data, ready to present. Free.