About The Royal Masonic Benevolent Institution Care Company (RMBI Care Co.)
RMBI Care Co. provides residential care, nursing and dementia support to older Freemasons, their families and people in the wider community. The charity has been caring for older people for over 170 years and today it supports over 1,000 residents across 18 care homes in England and Wales. For more information, please visit www.rmbi.org.uk.
Rob Murray is the project manager responsible for all construction projects in all 18 homes and has been a loyal MeetingKing user for many years.
RMBI Home Barford Court, Hove, East Sussex
The problem
Rob always manages 10 to 12 projects simultaneously all over the country and therefore spends a lot of time on the road and in hotels. Obviously each project involves many meetings with different parties. Like others, he used MS Word to document all meetings and tried to keep track of tasks in Excel. To keep on top of everything, he spent a lot of time at night in his hotel room to properly work out the minutes and update tasks. Because of time pressure, meeting minutes were sometimes delayed and it was hard to find certain information without opening multiple documents. Tasks were managed in a different application and there was no system for automatic reminders and as a result many tasks were not completed. In subsequent meetings, when Rob would go through the list on what was discussed and agreed on in the previous meeting, the task owner would often have to admit that he had forgotten about certain tasks or details.
Rob was finding it hard to keep on top of non-productive administrative work related to all his meetings and too many items fell through the cracks. Work got done, but at a high cost, so it was time for a change.
The solution and results
Rob did not really know what he wanted. He needed a tool that:
- would make it easier to prepare for meetings (prepare the agenda, see an update on the action points from the previous meeting),
- a tool to efficiently write, distribute and archive meeting minutes and
- something to keep track of tasks and decisions for each meeting.
He tried 6 different tools, some of which were strong in one area, but lacked in another and then signed up for the 30 days free trial for MeetingKing. Soon he knew this was exactly what he was looking for, it met all his needs and was simple and straightforward to use, clean and easy to navigate.
All meeting information and tasks are organized by location and project and by using tags he can easily find any note, decision or task related to a certain project. Rob starts using MeetingKing from the first meeting with each contractor. He created various custom agenda templates for different types of meetings and his templates include a lot of Private Notes. This dramatically reduces the time he needs to prepare as he can email the agenda (without the Private Notes) with a few clicks directly from MeetingKing. If the meeting is a follow-up on a previous meeting, he links the meetings together with the Follow-Up function and the tasks from the previous meeting(s) are automatically added to the agenda of the new one.
Since the note taking is so easy and quick, the minutes are done immediately after the meeting and Rob does not need to spend additional time working out the minutes at night. Everyone is always surprised to receive the minutes immediately after the meeting. Another benefit of the way you make meeting notes in MeetingKing is that it forces you to make clear decisions and assign tasks to someone and set a date by when the task should be completed. This turned out to be a huge improvement over the way meetings were run before. Now there is clarity on what was decided and who needs to do what.
The end result is that
- the accuracy of the meeting minutes has gone up,
- professionalism has gone up,
- tasks do not fall through the cracks anymore
- Time savings allowed him to manage 2 additional projects and spends less time stressing of administrative work at night.
Rob does not have to spend long nights working out that day’s meetings, what’s more he was able to take on 2 additional projects at the same time!
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