Fire drills happen when problems are discovered too late. Missed delivery dates, late invoices, and surprise churn rarely appear overnight. They build slowly in the gaps between teams, and they are only visible if you look at the right signals. A weekly operations review is the simplest way to catch the drift early and correct it while fixes are still cheap.

The goal of the review is not to recap everything. It is to identify the one or two constraints most likely to break delivery in the next two weeks. Keep it short and structured. A 30-minute meeting with a fixed agenda will beat a 90-minute free-for-all every time.

Start with a single dashboard that fits on one page. Include the metrics that actually predict trouble: on-time delivery rate, open projects by stage, backlog age, support response time, cash collection status, and any commitments due in the next two weeks. If the dashboard takes more than five minutes to update, it will not be used.

Run the meeting in three sections. First, status scan: each owner reports in one sentence whether their area is green, yellow, or red. Second, exception review: focus only on the reds and yellows and identify the root cause. Third, decision and assignment: choose one fix per problem and assign an owner with a due date.

The power of the review comes from the exceptions list. Do not discuss everything that is working. If a project is on track, it does not belong in the meeting. If a project is blocked, it gets the time. This keeps the meeting from turning into a status meeting and turns it into a risk meeting.

Use a simple issue template for each red item: what is broken, why it is broken, what outcome is at risk, and what is the smallest fix that removes the risk. The smallest fix is key. If the solution requires a full process redesign, you will defer it. If the solution is "assign a single owner for the handoff and confirm receipt," it will get done this week.

Include a capacity check. Each week, compare committed work to available hours. If capacity is overloaded, decide whether to defer work, bring in support, or reduce scope. Most delivery problems are not quality problems; they are capacity problems that were never acknowledged.

Track one leading indicator for customer risk. It could be support volume, NPS dips, or churn risk flags. If customer health is not in the weekly review, churn will feel like a surprise even though the signals were there.

Keep the review operational, not performative. Avoid slide decks and long narratives. The meeting should be a working session with live data and clear decisions. If a metric is red, the owner should already have a hypothesis and a proposed fix. This shifts the review from reporting into problem solving.

Close the review with a decision log. This can be a simple list in your project tool: decision, owner, due date, and expected impact. The log is the accountability layer. Without it, the review becomes an intellectual exercise with no operational follow-through.

Keep the same time and cadence. A weekly review only works if it is predictable. If it gets moved or skipped, the team learns it is optional, and the system breaks. Consistency is more valuable than perfection.

Protect the attendee list. Keep only the owners who can resolve issues, not everyone who wants visibility. If people attend without decisions to make, the meeting bloats and slows. Share the decision log afterward so the wider team stays informed without consuming the core 30 minutes.

After four weeks, look for repeated issues. If the same red item appears three weeks in a row, it is not a one-off problem. It is a system gap. Add it to an operations backlog and schedule a focused fix. The weekly review surfaces these patterns and gives you the proof to justify the change.

A weekly operations review is not a new layer of bureaucracy. It is a safeguard against preventable chaos. It reduces reactive scrambling, protects customer experience, and keeps leadership focused on the few issues that actually matter. Thirty minutes a week buys you hours of calm.