How Crystal Candy uses MeetingKing for David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done)

I am a fanatic GTD guy and MeetingKing is the ideal tool for implementing David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done) in any organization.

This is one of my favorite success stories. I am not sure if it is because it is of the unexpected location of this customer or because Jimmy and his team manage their entire business using MeetingKing.

Jimmy Psillos is General Manager of Crystal Candy, a highly successful manufacturer of chocolate and candy and the importer of Oreo cookies and Cadbury chocolates in Zimbabwe, a very difficult economic environment. Jimmy describes himself as a fanatic GTD (Getting Things Done) guy, and a lot of the recent task and project management functionality in the product was initiated by his suggestions. Crystal Candy has about 300 people, an office in Harare and an office in Bulawayo. They have been using MeetingKing since April 2013 and just renewed their annual subscription.

The problem

Crystal Candy uses David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system throughout their company to manage all their projects and tasks (more info on Getting Things Done). Like most companies, Jimmy and his colleagues at Crystal Candy have many meetings.

The problem was that there was a major disconnect between their meetings and the GTD task management system. They used a special GTD software, but that did not work well in meetings and it did not offer strong collaboration facilities to work together on the various projects within the company.

Jimmy and his people needed:

1. a more efficient way to capture action items during meetings,
2. an easy way to manage these action items,
3. a way to ensure tasks are actually completed, and;
4. complete visibility on what each team has to do for a certain project

The solution

After trying various meeting facilitation products without any positive results, Jimmy found MeetingKing.

MeetingKing offers exactly what he was looking for: a tool to capture everything that is discussed in the meeting, including all action items and a tool to manage all projects and tasks. The team loves the ability to carry tasks from meeting to meeting, so nothing will fall through the cracks.

Implementation and results

Since the company is managed using the GTD system, Jimmy and his managers, make extensive use of the Projects, Departments and Tags functionality in MeetingKing. If a new project is defined, usually in a meeting, it is immediately created in MeetingKing and the project team members are added.

The team uses the filter functionality to get a quick overview of each project to make sure that it is on track and all tasks are completed.

To improve meeting efficiency, the use of MeetingKing is now mandatory at Crystal Candy. Jimmy loves the ability to do everything on the fly during the meeting, so no-one needs to spend time making the minutes afterwards. This instant documentation gives everyone a real sense of satisfaction and prevents confusion afterwards.

Since using MeetingKing, their meetings are at least 50% more effective because everything is documented and tasks are clearly assigned. The task management in MeetingKing, especially the ability to link meetings so tasks from previous meetings are automatically added to the agenda of the new meeting, make it impossible for people to hide from any action item that was assigned to them. The result: by properly documenting, Things Get Done.

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