Many small teams deal with technology in bursts. Something breaks, someone complains, and a renewal notice sits in the inbox until it is handled in a hurry. A short check-in once a quarter is the simplest way I know to replace those bursts with a plan. Thirty minutes is enough if the meeting has a fixed agenda and one person keeps it moving. This is the format I use, and what I leave out of it.
Why quarterly, and why only thirty minutes
Monthly meetings tend to become status updates nobody wants to sit through. Once a year is too far apart, because a lot can change in twelve months, including the people who know where the logins are. Quarterly gives you real changes to review and keeps a problem from waiting a year to be noticed. Thirty minutes is short on purpose. It keeps the meeting on decisions and questions, and it keeps people from drifting into a project.
Who should be in the room
Keep it to three to five people. You need the owner or whoever approves spending, one person who handles the daily tools, and one person who sees the customer side, such as a receptionist, office manager or front-desk lead. If you are a team of two, the same two people still meet. The point is that every system your business depends on has someone in the room who actually uses it.
Before the meeting: send one page
I send a short written list a day or two ahead. It has four headings: open issues from last quarter, changes in people since then (new hires, departures and anyone who changed roles), renewals and contracts that end in the next ninety days, and support requests that took longer than they should have. Ask each person to bring one thing that slowed them down. Do not ask for a long report. Three or four lines from each person is plenty.
The agenda, minute by minute
Minutes zero to five: last quarter's open items. Read the action list from the last meeting. Mark each item done, still open or dropped. Anything dropped needs one sentence explaining why.
Minutes five to twelve: what slowed people down. Go around the room and write each item on a shared screen or a sheet of paper. Do not solve anything yet. You are only collecting.
Minutes twelve to twenty: people and access. Check who joined, who left and who changed roles since the last meeting. Confirm that every departed person's accounts, phone extension and devices have been closed. Confirm that each new person has what they need on their first day. If a shared login is still in use, add it to the list.
Minutes twenty to twenty-five: renewals and spending. Review everything that renews or ends in the next ninety days. For each item, decide whether to keep, change or cancel it, and name the person who will confirm with the vendor. This is where the waste usually hides: a subscription nobody has opened in months, or a phone line that still bills after the person who used it has gone.
Minutes twenty-five to thirty: pick the actions. Choose no more than three actions for the next quarter. Each one gets an owner and a due date. If an action cannot be finished by the next meeting, break it into a smaller step.
Keep one running action list
Put the action list in one place that everyone can open, such as a single shared document or spreadsheet with four columns: item, owner, due date and status. Read it at the start of every check-in. The list is the record of the meeting. If it lives in someone's notebook, it will not survive the next busy month.
What to leave out
A few things derail this meeting every time, so I make a point of leaving them out. Do not fix problems in the room. If a printer has been jamming for a week, assign it and move on. Do not debate vendors in detail; put the comparison on the list for a separate conversation. And do not turn the meeting into a blame session. The goal is to find the gap in the process, not the person who fell into it.
What to look for
You do not need a technical background to run this check-in. You are looking for patterns. Look for accounts that belong to people who no longer work with you. Look for recurring complaints about the same tool. Look for renewals that were never reviewed and for backups that nobody has tried to restore. Look for the one person who is the only one who knows how something works. That last pattern worries me most, and it is why a shared systems document is worth building alongside this meeting.
If you are a team of three
Small teams often skip the meeting because it feels like overhead. Keep it anyway, and shorten the written list to one page. Ten minutes of preparation is enough. A team that meets for thirty minutes four times a year will often find more problems in that time than it would by waiting for something to fail.
Close the meeting well
Before anyone leaves, book the next check-in on the calendar with the same length and the same agenda. Send the action list within a day. Then do the work. The meeting only pays off if the actions get done between now and the next one.
If the list shows that departures are a regular problem, my article on what to do the day an employee leaves covers the order I follow for closing accounts. Backups often come up in the "what slowed us down" round, and small business backups explains what to check. If the list is growing faster than your team can manage, managed IT services describes what an outside provider can take off your plate. DirecTech Connect works with businesses across Middle Tennessee on this kind of review. Once the meeting is running, a shared systems document gives the review something to check against.
Danielle Lemons is Vice President of Operations at DirecTech Connect, a Nashville provider of business phone systems, managed IT services, websites and digital marketing. More about Danielle.
Read more of Danielle’s writing, or see her profile at DirecTech Connect.
