A CTO is meant to sit and communicate between the business leadership and technical teams. Often, this means managing one or more teams of developers, and even working with third-party development firms, as an extension of an in-house team.
Even when there are product managers reporting to a CTO, the overall responsibility for a company's technical vision and operations sits with them. They often work closely with the CEO/Co-founder, other senior leaders, and report to or even sit on the board.
Consequently, hosting meetings is a big part of the CTO's job. Whether one-on-one, the whole development team, management, and communicating with technology partners and clients, a CTOs diary is often full of meetings.
There's nothing more demotivating, then numerous meetings without results.
Why are Meeting Notes essential?
Preparing meetings well in an asynchronous, collaborative way, is one part.
Recording decisions and action items during and after the meeting is the other important part.
Everyone needs to know who's doing what, and the actions they need to take. Otherwise a meeting is a waste of time. Without follow-up and accountability, meetings are just a bunch of people getting together to talk for a while. While that can be entertaining, meetings need to be serious fun to really motivate people.
Meetings need to be serious fun to really motivate people.
One of the most popular solutions for organising knowledge and meetings is Confluence. CTOs and technology teams around the world use it every day to plan meetings, then create the follow-up notes and minutes.
However, there are several problems that CTOs and technology teams often encounter when using Confluence for meeting notes. It’s a manual process, which takes time. If a team is busy, or no one in the meeting has the time, then taking notes is often overlooked, forgotten. Which means actionable items could fall through the cracks, without anyone taking ownership of them.
Challenges recording accurate Meeting Notes
No CTO wants to explain to a board or client the reason something important was missed is because meeting notes weren't taken. Someone forgot or was too busy. As a CTO, ultimate technical responsibility, vision and implementing the strategic plan falls on your shoulders.
Meeting notes that are taken within Confluence can get messy, unless someone is really good at organising them consistently. Notes can quickly get lost, outdated and abandoned. Ghosts in the system that only come back to haunt you when something important has been forgotten.
Also, within Confluence, meeting notes aren't automatically linked to the calendar. That makes them harder to find, unless you manually link them. Giving you or one of the team another admin task to ensure meeting notes are recorded accurately.
7 reasons why CTOs should care about meeting notes
- Meeting notes keep the whole team accountable. – Humans tend to forget. And worse, remember things incorrectly. You can easily avoid misunderstandings by adding a summary and written action items to the end of all your meetings.
- As CTO you need to be sure everyone is on the same page (literally, in case of Confluence). - True for development teams, technology partners, clients, or senior managers.
- For technical staff, distractions can kill productivity! During the meeting, a shared agenda and program will help to wake up the natural born timekeepers and Scrum masters. Live Meeting Notes will ensure the meeting is focused and results are recorded.
- Spending time on admin tasks during the first minutes of a meeting and starting late, can drain energy and focus from the team! Creating and sharing a meeting page, even if done just in time, should not require manual work.
- Without notes it can be difficult remembering decisions and key outcomes — thereby causing misunderstandings or simply leading to the fact that important decisions get forgotten. And, those recharging at the beach and in the mountains can update themselves when they're back!
- When everyone knows what they're meant to do next after a meeting, projects move forward more smoothly. Assigned action items will contribute to this point!
- Fewer mistakes are made when team members, managers, technology partners, and even clients have access to previous meeting notes with quick links and a performant full-text search. Sharing meeting notes beyond the participant list can make a huge impact on how the whole company stays aligned.
When meetings are crucial for communication and getting things worked out, clarifying aspects of a project, and solving problems, then notes are how CTOs ensure action is taken. Notes keep the team accountable, to a CTO and between themselves. Notes keep partners, clients, and even senior managers aligned.
Which means, when it comes to Confluence, CTOs need a solution for the meeting notes problems outlined above. Thankfully, one App already exists within the Atlassian ecosystem: Meetical Meetings for Confluence.
Meeting Management Solution: Meetical for Confluence
Meetical is an award-winning meeting management tool, based on Atlassian Confluence and Jira.
For busy CTOs, we take a look at how this solves the difficulties with Confluence meeting notes.
Calendar Extensions
Firstly, Meetical integrates Confluence with your work calendars. A calendar is an essential tool for any CTO. Ensuring this is connected to the solution you use for meetings is crucial. Meetical integrates directly with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook 365.
With the Confluence Outlook Integration (for Microsoft Outlook 365), there is a desktop and web Outlook plug-in to create, link, and find meeting pages.
In the Calendar Extensions, you simply click on “Add Confluence Page” and choose your space and template. Either use the default meeting template, or use one of the included templates. Busy CTOs who want to use their own format for meetings, such as a remote all-hands meeting, can create a new template.
With the Confluence Google Calendar Integration, Meetical integrates directly with Google Calendar. It integrates in G Suite through the Confluence Chrome Extension, allowing users to create, share and find meeting notes for any calendar event, directly from the event quick view. Calendar. This means you can create Confluence meeting notes directly from your browser. (Also available as Firefox Add-on).
Confluence Calendar Integration
Alongside the calendar extensions, you can create and access Confluence Meeting Notes from the new Internal Confluence Meeting Calendar. This additional tool helps to avoid context switches between different Apps and browser tabs. It’s also perfect for those users who cannot or do not want to install browser extensions.
Within Confluence itself, you can create meetings, create templates, and use templates for recurring meetings. On every page created with Meetical, you’ll see complete and up-to-date information, including the meeting status, date, time, attendees, and their RSVP status.
All pages automatically get populated with the status, date, time, location, description, including all attendees and their attendance status. All this information is in sync with the meeting invite. Dynamic information such as the meeting status, all open action items in a meeting series, and easy access links to conferencing tools such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams are added as well.
Crucially, when it comes to taking meeting notes for busy CTOs, the Meeting Notes page can be used to collect and collate action items and decisions during the meeting. You can then automatically share these with everyone who attended. Reports is another feature that can be used by CTOs to keep everyone on track between meetings.
For recurring meetings, all of this can be completely automated. So you don't need to worry about creating and sharing meeting pages “in the right moment”. Additional and manual admin steps should always be automated, as every development team knows. Ultimately, failing to do so is causing misalignment and action items to be forgotten, overlooked and left without an owner.
CTOs don't need to worry about ghosts in the system coming back to haunt them when notes are taken at the time, and everyone is aware of the actions they need to take. CTOs can work more easily when meetings and the notes are driving the agenda and journey forward. Meetical can be the autopilot for CTOs, helping them navigate through our sometimes hectic and complex work life more easily.
Summary
- Failing to take meeting notes can cause serious problems for CTOs.
- Confluence can be somewhat difficult to use, for CTOs and teams to take meeting notes in, and they’re easily lost and overlooked.
- Instead, using the Confluence App Meetical Meetings for Confluence, whether through the Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook 365 integrations, or directly in Confluence, CTOs can ensure notes are taken more quickly and easily. Keeping everyone on the same page and accountable.
Get Meetical today! Create Confluence Meeting Notes in seconds, direct from Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar.
