Checklist Planner. This Microsoft® Excel add-in has every feature that a meeting planner would want to make the creation or modifi cation of their plan very fast and easy. On the checklist side I discovered TaskAnyone™ from a company called Task Solutions. By spousing these two, the combination truly was the checklist on steroids that I was looking for. I think that it is important to high-
light some of the more useful features of these applications. Checklist Planner is my weapon of choice when putting a plan together. It has the ability to easily create and manage the hierarchy of a planner’s game plan, meaning that this application “outlines” what needs to get done into summaries, tasks and sub-tasks. All of these categories are color-coded and auto- matically given a WBS (work breakdown structure) annotation. Each task can be easily moved up or down or promoted/ demoted to different outline levels. Task dates can be directly entered using the pop-up calendar or calculated when pair- ing either a start or a fi nish date with a task duration input. Once the dates have been entered, planners can adjust them forward or backward by merely highlighting a date cell or range of dates and then selecting the right or left arrows in the user toolbar. A saved template can be imported at a lat- er date and with one command, new start date. All dates are then recalculated for the entire plan. This scheduling feature even adjusts for weekends and schedules tasks that must be completed (predeces- sors) before another task can be started. Using the spreadsheet’s native copy and paste commands makes the plan creation exercise very easy. But here is what really makes these
two applications special. These applica- tions work together so that once a plan is created in Checklist Planner you can do an export/import directly into Tas- kAnyone™. TaskAnyone™ is the perfect
WWW.MIDWESTMEETINGS.COM
way to manage and coordinate activities between all involved parties and resource providers. As the name implies, assigning a task to anyone is as simple as inputting their email address and letting TaskAn- yone™ send it to them. The application tracks task status and history thus giving a planner complete control over everything that is going on. Tasks can have support- ing documents attached to them or can be hyperlinked to external information. A plan can be published to the web or printed in several hard-copy formats.
Putting it all together
The real power of TaskAnyone™ is re-
alized when users “share” plans with other account holders. That brings me to the fi nal part of the Checklist Connection. Having meeting stakeholders, the plan- ning team and service providers all on the same page greatly diminishes the plan management workload. Working with connected vendors is a real benefi t for the planner. It is also a tremendous marketing op-
portunity for those best-in-class vendors that wish to be referenced as the local pro- vider for a particular service-related task in a meeting planning checklist. Service providers have the ability to offer custom, date-enabled checklists to their prospects via a simple hyperlink in a newsletter, email or on their website. A potential client, after submitting an email address and the date of their meeting, receives a fully developed meeting plan customized to their event date and referenced with participating local service providers and meeting planners that are ready to assist via TaskAnyone™.
With Checklist Connec-
tions, juggling just got a whole lot easier. RJ Heestand
rj@checklistconnections.com
✓
“Having meeting stakeholders, the planning team and service providers all on the same page greatly diminishes the
plan management
workload. Working with “connected
vendors is a real benefit for the planner.
✓
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