In today’s professional world, is it possible to imagine a day at work without a meeting? If you are a project manager, could you visualize a day without meetings? Most probably, the answer, in either case, would be a ‘no’!
Not exciting enough? 
I hear you.
How about a project manager managing two projects simultaneously with his teams geographically spread out across nations? What if one project is agile-based while the other is traditional? Throw in another dimension of customer and vendor locations, and you have a tantalizing cocktail of project management challenges enough for ‘PM Nirvana’!
Step back and visualize a day in the life of such a project manager. I am sure it would be a layer of meetings; meetings with teams, management, customer, vendors et al. If the project manager is lucky, then a PMO (project management office) would come to his rescue to administer these meetings.
The nature of the meetings could be very diverse and dependent on the phase of the project. Starting with project kickoff, the project manager would have to deal with meetings for requirements gathering, scope definition, scheduling, cost estimation, risks, and others.
As the project enters the execution phase, the project manager needs to manage the project progress review, issues, escalations, stakeholders, and many more!
Meeting management is a separate monster that we would reserve for another blog.
It would be worth reflecting on the number of meeting agendas to be set, accurately capturing discussion points, and clearly documenting action items along with their owners and due dates.
On a project which could be for six months, one could hazard a guess about the total number of meeting aspects that need the project manager and the team’s focus.
With so much going on in the life of a project, the questions that I have for business leaders and project professionals are –
1. “How confident are you about the status of various decisions and action items agreed upon and their likelihood of successfully being addressed by respective owners?”
2. “At any given point in time, could you, with confidence, identify all the open action items along with their owners?”
Well, you may argue that we maintain all our meeting action items along with their owners and due dates in Excel or a Meeting Management Software. So, what are you trying to convey?
My counterargument would be – projects are managed possibly through Excel, Microsoft Project, Oracle Primavera, and a host of other stand-alone software! The most important aspect here is to be able to integrate all the meeting action items along with proactive status tracking with their owners as per agreed timelines.
Do we have an alternative solution that empowers project managers to digitize meetings and review action items seamlessly with their respective owners?
Fortunately, this is one of the essential aspects of TouchBase® product design strategy.
TouchBase helps you manage meetings, integrate with software such as Outlook®, and digitize meeting agendas, action items, due dates, and ownership.
TouchBase® offers a single and comprehensive view of all action items in a project across multiple meetings making the life of a project manager and his team much simpler.
Test drive TouchBase® to explore a new world of managing projects smartly and seamlessly!
