Identifying and defining your Business Scenarios is a crucial step in ensuring your organization both realize full value from its investment in AskCody and achieves a smooth adoption. This Step is to understand the Meeting Journey in your business.
AskCody is your full circle Meeting Management Platform allowing organizations and users taking care of managing meetings through the entire lifecycle of a meeting from booking a room, welcoming visitors, managing meeting services, to completing the meeting.
Getting the most out of AskCody, prior to implementing, we highly recommend that you meet with all stakeholders and personas involved in managing meetings in your workplace, to map the entire meeting journey, to understand the process of managing meetings better, and get a holistic 360 view of meetings.
What is Meeting Journey Mapping?
Meeting Journey Mapping is a crucial step and achieving success in implementing a Meeting Management Platform like AskCody. In its essence, it's creating a flowchart of all steps and all stakeholders and personas involved in managing meetings, and its sequential dependencies.
Mapping out all processes related to meetings and managing them within an organization is a crucial step before implementing a meeting management solution. This process, often referred to as "as-is" analysis or "Meeting Journey Mapping", involves understanding the current state of affairs and processes in terms of how meetings are scheduled, managed, executed, conducted, and documented. Here are several reasons why this step is essential to perform as the team implementing AskCody to achieve a successful implementation:
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Identifying Inefficiencies: Mapping out existing meeting processes allows organizations to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks. It helps pinpoint areas where time and resources are being wasted, to many activities are manual, bottlenecks, whether due to redundant tasks, unnecessary meetings, or communication breakdowns. This information is vital for streamlining processes and making meetings more effective and the process more efficient.
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Understanding Stakeholder Needs: Different personas and stakeholders within an organization have unique needs and expectations when it comes to meetings and managing meetings (the priorities of the receptionists are not the same as with IT or FM). Mapping out processes provides insights into how various teams and individuals currently engage with meetings and managing them. This understanding is crucial for tailoring a meeting management solution to accommodate diverse requirements, contingencies, and preferences, and helps you as a team and organization prioritize.
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Clarifying Roles and Responsibilities: Meeting processes often involve multiple individuals with distinct roles and responsibilities. Mapping these out helps clarify who is responsible for what during different phases of a meeting, from scheduling to follow-up actions. This clarity is fundamental for accountability and ensures that everyone understands their role in the meeting ecosystem and throughout the meeting journey.
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Enhancing Communication Channels: Effective communication is essential for successful meetings and efficient meeting management processes across your entire organization, as it involves many different parties and stakeholders from different functions (Office worker, Kitchen, FM, IT, Finance, Hospitality, Security, etc.). By mapping out existing processes, organizations can identify communication gaps and opportunities for improvement. This includes not only the communication within the meeting management process itself but also getting are more holistic understand of how all the steps across the organization must play together in harmony. Understanding these dynamics is critical for implementing a comprehensive meeting management solution.
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Gaining Insights into Technology Integration: Organizations may already be using various tools and technologies for meeting management tasks. Mapping out processes helps identify these tools and how they are currently integrated into the workflow, if they are redundant or needs adjustment. This knowledge is invaluable when selecting or developing a meeting management solution that seamlessly integrates with existing technologies, preventing redundancy and ensuring a smooth transition.
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Aligning with Organizational Goals: Every organization has specific goals and objectives. Mapping out meeting processes allows for an assessment of whether current practices align with these overarching goals set by the overall organization, not the single individual. It helps ensure that the proposed meeting management solution supports the organization's broader mission and contributes to overall efficiency and productivity.
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Managing Change Effectively: Implementing a meeting management solution often involves change. Achieving success is must more about driving the change management process, than the system itself. By understanding the current state of meeting processes and involving key stakeholders in the mapping process, organizations can proactively manage resistance to change. Clear communication about the reasons for the change and the benefits it brings helps create a smoother transition.
In conclusion, mapping out all processes related to meetings and managing them provides a comprehensive foundation for implementing a meeting management solution. It enables organizations to address inefficiencies, understand stakeholder needs, clarify roles, enhance communication, integrate technology effectively, align with organizational goals, and manage change more effectively. This proactive approach sets the stage for a successful and seamless implementation of a solution that truly meets the organization's needs.
Why mapping out the Meeting Journey is important in achieving a successful implementation?
- With a fully mapped out Meeting Journey as a flowchart, you have a clear overview of all processes, dependencies, contingencies, and business Scenarios, allowing you to effectively measure success and realize tangible results.
- A Meeting Journey Map help teams understand how Office 365, Outlook, Exchange and AskCody can help them achieve more and be more productive and efficient throughout the workday across the organization.
- The Meeting Journey Map (the flowchart) can help with awareness and readiness activities by putting the platform and different features in context and provide a holistic overview; people will know when and how to use them and understand how each step and activity forms part of a bigger picture, and create value for the entire business.
- Meeting Journey Mapping helps driving the implementation to cover the needs of your organization and help the team in charge of implementing the solution, that covers the relevant processes and jobs-to-be-done.
Getting started with Meeting Journey Mapping
Getting started with Meeting Journey Mapping and to identify the business processes and scenarios, it’s best to involve the people and stakeholders who are involved in the scenarios and processes today, and who is going to drive and support the implementation throughout the organization. You’ll want to run a few workshops inviting the department leads, project managers, IT and other stakeholders who can help brainstorm on how AskCody is going to be used in your organization and what business processes AskCody is going to support going forward.
The following questions are a great starting point to identify your processes and scenarios:
- Who are the stakeholders and personas involved in management meetings today?
- What are the needs, rules, priorities and contingencies and dependencies of each stakeholder?
- What are the rationale and benefit of these needs and priorities?
- What are some of the organization’s challenges relating to meetings today? Can you identify any struggles or bottlenecks?
- What are the pains and needs you want to get solved by implementing AskCody?
- What does the current process look like today to book meetings, meeting services, take care of guests at the front desk, check-in for meetings, etc.? How is each step sequentially dependent?
- Hint: create a process diagram / flow chart for the following processes, based on each stakeholder:
- Meeting room booking
- Meeting service booking and management (end-to-end for both front end employees and back-office staff)
- Registering guests and visitors, checking in guests, and managing guests at the reception.
- Hint: create a process diagram / flow chart for the following processes, based on each stakeholder:
- What challenges do these processes create? What are the main pains?
- Why isn’t this particular technology/service/product/situation/issue working for your organization right now?
- What would the optimal process look like? How should that be achieved – both system-wise but also human wise? What does success look like and how should success in the new process be measured?
- Are there any changes that need to be adopted for employees or stakeholders to achieve this process, or can it be handled by the system only?
Answering these questions, writing down the answers or drawing flow chart diagrams for the different processes of both as-is and to-be will give you a great understanding of what AskCody should help you achieve and how the system should be configured to help you achieve these goals.
When testing the system in Phase 3, we recommend that you test it against the needs and processes you have described in this step, to secure that the system performs and covers the needs of your business.