Tips & Tricks

Best Practice for Meeting Execution Flow The meeting execution flow, presented below, is part of our MeetingResult meeting system.

After you click on the meeting name from the list of planned meetings the meeting execution screen will be displayed. Next we recommend that you follow the steps below in the order presented.

1. Start the meeting timer as soon as you open the dashboard and are ready to begin the meeting. This is done by clicking on the “play” button next to the timer at the top of the meeting execution dashboard.
2. Take Attendance – click on the attendance button. A popup window will be displayed with a list of all people invited to the meeting. Click on the name of each person in attendance to record attendance. If you need to add more attendees on the fly you can do so by clicking on the edit icon next to the Attendees header. If you need to add an attendee that is not in your Stakeholder list you can use the plus button in the upper right hand corner of the Choose Attendees popup.
3. Review Objective(s) for the meeting. Additions or changes can be accomplished by clicking on the edit icon to the right of the Objectives header.
4. Review the Agenda for the meeting. Additions or changes can be accomplished by clicking on the edit icon to the right of the Objectives header.

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Create Templates for all Recurring Meetings Creating a meeting template saves time for similar meetings in the future.

MeetingResult allows you to clone previous meetings when creating a new meeting. This feature can be leveraged to help you speed up the planning process for future meetings. Rather than searching for a past meeting to clone you can create a set of meeting templates and store them in one location for easy retrieval when you are planning new meetings. Follow the steps below to create a template repository and a set of meeting templates for reoccurring meetings.

1. Create a Templates Project – The Templates Project will act as the repository to hold all of the meeting templates that you will access when planning your meetings.
2. Create Meeting Templates – Within the Templates Project create and plan a meeting that contains the location information, objective(s), agenda items and attendees for each reoccurring meeting that you will need to plan in the future.
3. When you need to create a new meeting use the meeting cloning functionality and choose the appropriate template. Once you create the new meeting using one of the templates you can make any changes that are required. You will need to assign the meeting to the correct project that it will belong to and also choose the appropriate date/time and duration.
4. Repeat these steps to create additional meeting templates.

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Create Projects for Areas of Responsibility Where you Have Meetings

Sometimes you have meetings that don’t necessarily fall within a project. For example maybe you have a monthly or quarterly division meeting to review progress towards strategic goals. You still want to use MeetingResult to plan, execute and follow through on these meetings but they don’t really belong to a project. Don’t let that trip you up. Simply create a project and name it Monthly Divisional Meetings. We used the term project for the container that holds meetings simply because most meetings do fall within the boundaries of a project. However this container can be used for any area of responsibility where meetings are used to get things done.

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Add Stakeholders to Projects For Quick Access When Planning Meetings

When you are creating your projects make sure you add all the stakeholders that are associated with the project. If you do this then they will be at the top of the list within the project stakeholders section when you are planning meetings and choosing attendees. This just makes it faster to add attendees to meetings that you plan. Otherwise you have to scroll or search in order to add attendees.

1. When you are creating a project select all of the Project Stakeholders that will have some affiliation with the project. These are individuals that will either attend meetings or will be subscribers to the outcome of meetings.
2. Now when you go to create and plan meetings the list of project stakeholders will show up at the very top of the stakeholder list when selecting meeting attendees and meeting subscribers.

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Tell People You Aren’t Checking Email!

We have all been in that uncomfortable situation before. You are in a meeting and you just have to check your email or look at that very important text message you received so you discreetly pull out your phone and take a peak. Next thing you know someone across the table is glaring at you with a look of disapproval. You feel so ashamed. Well I have gotten these looks before using my iPad to capture meeting assets within MeetingResult. The best way to combat this is to let people know when the meeting starts that you will be capturing important meeting notes, action items, decisions, issues and risks using a tool called MeetingResult on your iPad. Hopefully this will also peak their curiosity about MeetingResult and open the door for you to share the love!
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Subscribe Instead of Invite People To Your Meetings

Designating people as Meeting Subscribers has two significant advantages. The first advantage is that it keeps people looped in on important information by providing them with a concise meeting summary report that includes the key meeting assets (i.e. notes, action items, decisions, issues and risks) captured during the meeting. The second advantage is that it reduces the number of meetings that people are required to attend. If someone only needs to know what happened during a meeting save them time and limit the number of people in the meeting by designating them as a meeting subscriber. In MeetingResult when you are choosing attendees for your meeting double click on the names of those that you would like to designate as Subscribers for the meeting. When you send the meeting summary report out from within MeetingResult they will automatically be included on the email in the cc: field.
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Record & Label That Note

The audio record feature included in MeetingResult was something that we hadn’t used a whole lot until recently. We have been attending a bunch of meetings where we really wanted to capture everything that someone was saying vs. trying to summarize what the person was saying so that we could go back later and fully digest what they had to say by listening to them say it a couple more times. When recording an audio note enter a one sentence description in the description text box for the note. Include who was speaking and about what topic in the description. This makes it really easy to retrieve later by using the search feature or by scanning a meeting summary.
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