The Virtual Meeting Coach

One activity ripe for re-engineering is the the way we do project update meetings which, in their traditional form, can be expensive, time-consuming, and not always terribly productive.The mission of most project meetings is to update project participants on work status.

Even today, most project meetings are organized for speed rather than quality and seldom incorporate more than basic participation. But this is starting to change. In the last few years, dispersed teams have begun experimenting with new approaches to project meetings, including the use of live, two-way and group conversations held online in multimedia web conference rooms.

Enough practical experience has been accumulated that it’s now possible to draw some conclusions about two-way and group web conferencing. The good news is that it can lower costs, save time, improve quality, and enable more people to participate more often. Taken together, these benefits have the potential to help business managers boost productivity.

Project conferences that utilize webconferencing need careful planning and may require some technical and production support. But when properly planned and implemented, virtual meetings deliver at least five significant benefits:

1. Cost savings Without the need for air and ground travel, hotel lodging, dining, and so forth, a full-service e-meeting costs, on average, about one-fifth as much as a traditional on-site meeting.

2. Higher attendance – It is totally possible to conduct electronic meetings that generate attendance rates as high as or higher than traditional on-site meetings – in the 90-100 percent range. But this is unlikely to happen unless the web conference is supported by a well-planed invitation campaign.

To some people, a “web conference” can seem less important than an on-site meeting. To get around this bias, your invitation process needs to convey the importance of the meeting and include a series of reminder communications in the days (and/or hours) prior to the meeting.

The Coach’s Short List offers a time-tested template for setting up and managing your invitation process. While web meeting setup does need to be handled carefully, experience shows that e-meetings can have an even higher rate of participation than on-site meetings because of the convenience of attending (saving traffic time, etc.).

3. Simultaneous tracking, assessing, reinforcement of group agreements and learning - Virtual meeting rooms, especially those equipped to record meetings, have built-in support for displaying and tracking the real-time participation of all meeting partiipants. Recordings can provide valuable off-line reinforcement of agreements reached as well as documentation of new issues that may have arisen during the meeting. Visual elements including slides, whiteboard sketches, and live document edits allow you to more fully engage meeting participants and can also be shared later with team members who might not have been able to attend the meeting in real-time.

4. More time and effort on task – Holding project management meetings in various geographic locations to accommodate team members can consume a great deal of travel time and cause significant wear and tear on the whole team. Sparing travel time by making it possible for people to meet from the convenience of their own offices not only saves expenses, it focuses critical human energies on crucial project tasks instead of travel.

5. Increased understanding for non-native speakers – The opportunity to share and annotate slides, sketches, documents, spreadsheets, pictures and more in virtual conference rooms can reduce or eliminate potential misunderstanding, especially in situations where one language is dominant among some project members, but not all of them. Second-language challenges are lessened when project updates take place in virtual conference rooms equipped with voice, video sharing, whiteboards, photo display, text chat and video display functions.

Real-time access to data in multiple formats can significantly reduce delays and potentially damaging misunderstandings, especially when recordings are posted so they can be reviewed at a later time to verify what was communicated.

A COUPLE OF RECOMMENDATIONS

If you’re a regular reader, you know how much I like to use the free web conferencing tools. Recent episodes of The Virtual Meeting Coach Show, for instance, were recorded in a vYew room. In addition to vYew, two other full-featured free tools I enjoy using and recommending to clients are DimDim and WiZiQ.

DimDim was designed with business audiences in mind and has a high-end look and feel that may be just what you need for your group. WiZiQ is a full-featured virtual classroom, created to make learning with others at a distance – and in real-time – real easy. (WiZiQ is also a social-network for teachers and learners of all kinds and includes a dedicated group for project managers that you can join for free and learn wit peers!)

DimDim

WiZiQ

Both tools are full-featured online conference platforms that offer real-time access to voice conferencing (with or without webcams), video and photo sharing, live text chat, desktop sharing, and interactive whiteboards that make it easy for groups to take notes together in real-time, including annotating slide presentations. Both also offer recording capabilities and the ability to embed your recordings in websites, blogs, or moodles. DimDim offers the added benefit of direct integration with Facebook and Yahoo’s collaborative messaging app, Zimbra.

You can sign up to use the free versions of both programs with no obligation for as long as you’d like. If you decide you like one – or both – both sites offer very reasonably priced premium/pro memberships that include more features, offer more seats for participants, and the option of branding your meetings with your personal or company logo. Neither will break the bank.

You can try DimDim here.
You can try WiZiQ here.

If you’re on the hunt for ways to save money and time and boost productivity in your project meetings, I recommend you try out one or both of these platforms with your team. I’ve had great success using all three – vYew, DimDim, and WiZiQ- with a variety of groups!

In future posts, I’ll have more to say about a handful of other specialty web conferencing tools that sport fewer bells and whistles than these full-featured tools but work just great when you don’t need a Full-Meal Deal.

I don’t know about you, but I’m watching the economic news from the sidelines.

On the one hand, things look truly bleak. Some days the future’s so far in the RED that it almost looks BLACK.

On the other hand, with everything in the toilet – now including the US auto industry – there’s a lot more room for new possibilities.

I never thought I’d find myself feeling gleeful watching so many things and so many concepts we’ve considered “valuable” get flushed away all at once. But as the news gets worse and worse, I find I’m often feeling better and better.

Call me perverse.

Maybe I’m finally getting the wisdom of hopelessness Meg Wheatley wrote about after 9/11.

Whatever it is,  besides feeling surprisingly okay watching most of my lifesavings float away,  I’m also getting more and more excited about helping friends and other independent business people develop their “telepresence.” Because it’s time now. Really time!

We simply have to do some things differently if we expect to save money and save time for what’s really important in 2009. And using social media – including virtual meetings – is one of the best ways I know to augment close business and personal relationships without driving and flying all over the place all the time.

So, what is “telepresence?”

The way I use that new word, “telepresence,” is a little different than the way the manufacturers of the expensive, high-definition video conferencing systems are using it. I’m not talking about buying and installing $50-$300K remote viewing systems in your home office.

For me, “telepresence” is a way of referring to your skill at being present with people you’re not able to be in the same room with.

Understood this way, “telepresence” has nothing to do with hardware and very little to do with software.

Instead, “telepresence” is about using your telephone, IM, text messaging, and now virtual meeting rooms in ways that make people feel like you’re with them, even when you’re across town, across the country, or across the globe from their physical bodies.

Looked at this way, telepresence is a set of engagement skills. Some of them are technical. Most of them are social. Some parts can become routine. Some will remain art and, therefore, require practice. But the good news is that all of them are FREE to develop and practice.

Skype, GTalk, DimDim, Yuuguu, Yugma, vYew, Elluminate, and WiZiQ all offer free places to practice and play with people around the block or around the globe.  New places are opening up every week. Get yourself a membership in one or more of these places and let’s practice!

Instead of wringing our hands about things too big for us to change, I’d like to suggest that the year ahead is going to be a great time to practice our “telepresence.” Like Meg Wheatley, I’m ready to “journey through this time of increasing uncertainty. Groundless, hopeless, insecure, patient, clear. And together.”

What have we got to lose?