[AiYa – MeetingArkAdmin]

What are good ways to coordinate diaries? How do you deal with complicating factors like different time zones?

[Ron Eagle]

Ensuring diaries across the attendees list are accurately aligned can be dauting and key factors can be:

1. Is there a single corporate diary system that all staff (or all staff in the areas you are requesting attendance from) can access and which automatically send entries to each person’s diary once the invite is sent?
2. Are all (or some e.g. senior staff members) diaries maintained separately ?

The level of difficulty in co-ordination and alignment will be hugely affected  by the degree to which the former (where diary slots availability will be the biggest challenge)  is in place compared to the latter (which will give the added chore of back and forth dairy slot availability negotiations, possible challenges of PA/secretarial ‘front lines’ to some staff etc.)

Also, beyond the mechanics of date/time co-ordination there may be the need to persuade/justify attendances where those staff are not directly instructed to attend by superiors).

[AiYa – MeetingArkAdmin]

Hi Ron!

Thank you for this.

I was wondering if you have come across issues with the different types of software used for this and if you have any ideas on how to deal with people  (for example from other companies or organisations) who have to be at the meeting but are not on the internal booking system?

[Ron Eagle]

hi keymaster

issue if differing sw is best resolved by ensuring links sent include a version that allows joining via browser even if you don’t have the sw installed – most meeting packages allow this although joining via just a browser link can sometimes  be slower and have features limited compared to joining through the same sw.

re the externals issue – ensure conversations ie direct calls are made to persons holding their diaries well in advance

[AiYa – MeetingArkAdmin]

I was wondering if anyone has encountered the situation where the organisation’s diary system was down for an extended period of time – and what happened?

[Ron Eagle]

In past lives have needed to appoint  staff co-ordinators to maintain a central diary on a single laptop for meeting appointments (usually  by department with departmental coordinators cooperating between themselves for inter departmental diary alignments) with  mails/texts out to individuals who are expected to maintain their personal appointments on their smart phones diary entries or maybe even some old notebook/Filofax diaries.

[AiYa – MeetingArkAdmin]

So a cascade to a local laptop and even onwards to physical notebooks and boards.

[Ron Eagle]

physical notes was a proven system for centuries so why not?

[Author]

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