Our company has very typical weekly and monthly management meetings comprised of different combinations of our management team. I have yet to see a project management platform that includes a function to schedule a meeting, invite people to the meeting and build an agenda for the meeting. I don’t understand why. It is such a basic function of every project. I know there are probably ways to create work arounds, but why is this not a basic function?
It might make sense to put Meetings as a level above projects so that a meeting can be held for just one project or multiple projects can be discussed in one meeting. Without knowing more about your project structure that is hard to answer, but I can see where a user might have multiple projects coming from multiple organizations and personal sources. I think adding a layer where multiple projects can be associated with one meeting would give a lot of flexibility.
Agendas typically have
- old completed business
- old business that is still in process
- new business.
All of these sections would be such a natural fit to assigning tasks. The meetings are very typically comprised of a series of topics of what is going on. In reality, these are generally tasks that are part of the project. In the meeting section, the meeting host should be able to add any combination of ‘Topics’, ‘Projects’ and ‘Tasks’. (Topic is really just another name for a task, but it will be less confusing for the end user.) Each of these should have the ability to mark them as requiring ‘Follow-up’ at the next meeting. This would prevent things from slipping through the cracks.
Oversight - I also never see any fields for the ability to assign ‘oversight’ of a task. Most organizations have a boss that assigns tasks and wants to know when a task is done. If they agree that it is done to satisfaction, then the boss closes the book on it. This would make delegation so easy to keep track of for people with lots of people working under them.
Attendance at meetings - Meeting Minutes typically keep track of who was in attendance. If there was an invitation list, it could easily track who showed up and what time.
Meeting Organization - Once a meeting is done, keeping track of agendas and meeting minutes is a pain. Asana could have a folder for all meeting minutes and agendas for every project. That way they would be very organized by project and date. The minutes could be made available to everyone to see. (Admins should be able to edit them). A notification to everyone invited that minutes are available would be nice too. If you get really fancy include a transcript of all video chat meetings.
Video Chat Links - Modern meetings all have video chat options. Linking in Zoom, Teams, and whatever other platforms that you integrate for video would make all users have one spot for the links to join the meeting. How convenient would that be.
Calendaring - Apple, Outlook and Goggle calendars clearly don’t play nice. It would be great if Asana could allow the end user to choose their preferred calendar integration and then send appropriate MATCHING invites based on their preference. That way when we create a new meeting for a project, the correct calendar invite goes out and is hopefully automatically added to the end users calendar!
Notifications - End users should be able to choose their preferred notifications, but bosses should be able to require at least one of them to be turned on.
Meeting Reminders - Build in a function to automatically send a reminder for meetings at a selectable interval.
