My outcome of the meeting is to control all the projects are still there
This is too vague.
People have a tendency to forget things that were delegated to them. To be on course I would like to have regular meetings with direct reports (let's say twice per month) to make sure no projects were dropped or stopped during that time frame for no reason.
This is nice and specific. Well done.
One of the realities managers face is that they can't do their employees' work for them. You could probably use Waiting For to remember everything you don't want your employees to forget, but that would be massively counterproductive. On the other hand, managers are responsible for the deliverable, and so bear the burden of everything their employees fail to do. So your plan has to involve creating a self-perpetuating process by which your employees don't forget their specific responsibilities, don't drop projects, and don't do anything to stop projects from moving forward toward completion.
I'm assuming that this is problem you're trying to solve: right now, employees are forgetting their responsibilities, dropping projects, and projects are stopping. If this isn't the problem, I'd spend some time defining the problem more precisely.
The main vehicle you're contemplating for making this happen is a biweekly meeting with your four direct reports. I think this is a good starting point for testing a solution, but I'd encourage you to keep an open mind and contemplate other solutions, and to continually interrogate yourself: is this solution working or not? How is it failing? What changes can I make to address the failures? It may be, for example, if this is a hair-on-fire problem, that you need to have a DAILY meeting with your four direct reports. On the other hand, if things are basically working well, a more relaxed touch-base-every-two-weeks meeting schedule is perfect.
But the most important goal you have is to get buy-in from your four direct reports regarding the outcome you're after: less forgetting, no dropping, no stopping; keep projects moving forward. Some questions for you to ask them: how are our people remembering their responsibilities? why are they forgetting them? why are projects stopping?
Ultimately, your employees are going to have to find a way of remembering what they're responsible for. It sounds like there may be a lack of connection right now between their forgetting and the consequences of their forgetting. This might be the right place to intervene: a frequent, regular, systematic review by each report and his or her 20 employees of their reponsibilities, progress toward meeting responsibilities, and action-oriented behaviors to pick up dropped balls.
Putting a metric in place will help enormously (what gets measured gets managed): how many balls got dropped yesterday? this week? since our last biweekly meeting? when and how did your direct reports intervene? what proactive steps did they take to keep it from happening again. This kind of review will quickly show patterns and clarify the underlying problems.
With this in mind, GTD can help you by reminding you of the outcome and the steps of the plan. I'd put together an @agenda checklist for each meeting with each direct report. The checklist would contain each step of the plan: what specifically has gotten forgotten? did we move forward on each project as planned? in what ways did we not move forward? is the process working, and if not, what specific next actions do we need to take to move us toward the outcome we want? And so forth.
If the problem is that YOU can't remember where each project is, who it's delegated to, what deadlines need to be observed and anticipated, then I think setting up a checklist of these questions for daily review, by Project, is a simple method. I know from your other posts that you spend an enormous amount of time in meetings, so it may be difficult to review at daily intervals. But if the problem is that your 80 people are forgetting important responsibilities, then your first task is to set up a review process that catches forgotten tasks frequently enough to stop the cascade of resulting problems. First, you review what you need to keep track of; then, your direct reports give you the data you need; then you and they lock onto specific failures among your 80 people and work out systems for preventing those failures. Repeat as frequently as necessary -- is biweekly frequently enough?
Sometimes an item on a Waiting For list is not enough. I'm in a similar position to you, although with fewer people under me, and I find that items on the Waiting For list tend to float in a context-less zone that doesn't trigger my own Next Action specifically enough. I use checklists constantly to re-orient myself about where I am in the sequential chain of next actions that are moving me forward toward my desired outcome in each project. So, a typical item on my Waiting For list might be something like this: "Wait for materials quote from Clarissa on ceiling trim, then review trim checklist before ordering." The checklist grounds me in action.
Helpful? Where is your system failing you?
