Our Best Practices at Work for You By Dee Johnson, CMP, Meeting & Event Project Manager Striving to increase efficiency and productivity and improve our client service—these are the maxims of the newly titled Meeting & Event Operations Department at Conferon. Over the past five months, representatives from the six regional offices have been working on Best Practice Committees looking for ways to improve the four critical tools used daily to provide the best possible meetings for our customers: Timeline, Budget, Agenda and Post Conference Report. Each of these new templates is being created in Microsoft® Excel to allow for increased functionality in sorting information, calculations, and linking or sharing information between documents, thus eliminating possible duplication of efforts. The first tool to be introduced this fall, the Timeline, will be created based on the amount of time available to plan the meeting, and the compatibility of the client’s and manager’s schedules with their other meetings and internal deadlines. Once the due dates are established, both client and manager will be able to confirm the completion status of all tasks required for a particular meeting. The Budget and Post Conference Report forms are in the final stage of completion by the committees. To increase work efficiency, information in both of these documents will be tied to information in the Agenda, which is still in development. When this document is closer to completion, our IS Department will assist us in creating the new template forms. Watch for more information on all of these new tools plus others during the upcoming months, where we will continue to focus our best practice approach to meeting management.