Accessible via the Internet from work, at home, or while traveling, Meeting Management
provides a centralized system to plan and track all of your meeting-related activities,
including site research, sourcing, budgeting, session planning, resource and task
management as well as powerful reporting from a single location. The Management
Review module provides for documentation and management of various types of meetings.
Where the CA/PA and Material Non-Conformance modules provide mission-specific functionality,
this module provides the generalized means of documenting and managing the administration
for many types of meetings.
Careful planning and preparation are essential to maximizing meeting effectiveness.
Governmental bodies and other groups and organizations must conduct much of their
business through meetings, so it is important that these sessions be meaningful
and productive. Those who participate in these groups are busy people who may be
willing to become more involved if they know their time will be well spent.
A chairperson can be assigned to planning, and he or she may delegate some duties
to facilitators and other individuals. But everyone who attends the meeting should
be prepared to participate and contribute to the business at hand and the meeting
should have a standard scheduled date and starting time. The length of the meeting
may be fixed (that is, have a specified ending time), or it may be determined by
the volume of business to conduct. At its first login, the facilitator can decide
whether to set an ending time. It is important that the leader adhere to these times
in subsequent meetings.
One of the most important parts of meeting planning is preparing the agenda. The
agenda is a helpful tool for guiding discussion. The chairperson may have one or
two members summarize the discussion to ensure that all meeting participants clearly
understand the decisions made. When decisions and/or recommendations have been made,
the system can be used as documentation to support them. For this reason, once unmistakable
recommendations have been made, the system is designed to support them. Repeating
or summarizing someone’s contribution can be beneficial to the group’s efficiency.
Meeting Management helps keep a handle on all the things that help make meetings
successful. It allows agendas to be set, time schedules to be locked down and easy,
straightforward dissemination of meeting minutes. Meeting Management helps keep
those involved in meetings in touch and better involved in the business process
between and during meetings.