Friday, June 17, 2011

Do you know what you're talking about?

I took part in a webcast-conference call yesterday.

We got an Outlook invite to the call about a week ago, so we had tons of advance warning about it. When I dialed in, I had my computer on the webcast and I had my headset on to listen via the phone. I quickly realized that we had no agenda for the call. AND the lead on the call wasn't the most savvy person about the new tool that we were going to discuss on the call.

One part was where the lead was supposed to show us how to move items into the new database. But as I listened, the lead was going through a workflow that was something I would NEVER do. And the manner in which the lead was doing it opened up the possibility of errors/mistakes. Ay-yay-yay!

Thankfully one of the other callers spoke up and conveyed the workflow they were performing to get items into the new database and it was exactly what I was doing. So once they finished explaining their process, I chimed in and said I was doing it the same way.

Then we walked through another process where we needed to load other data onto the database. These would be files where we'd often have 2 or 3 or 4 or even 5 files with the same name. And we needed to keep ALL the versions. The lead didn't bring up the fact that we would need to always "uncheck" the default so that we would NOT overwrite existing files. We'd have to manually update the file names. And since the lead didn't say anything, I chimed in about it. Wouldn't you know it, no one had thought about that particular situation. I'm just thinking that no one had been "unchecking" the overwrite button and were erroneously replacing files. Oy!

It would have been SO nice if the lead had pulled together even a small agenda before the meeting. This way we'd all know what we'd be going over and have some prepared questions. I just had attending meetings that don't have an agenda. One of my pet peeves for sure.

When you are the designated lead, do you always put together an agenda? Isn't the meeting always better than if you go by the flying by the seat of your pants method?

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