real-time visuals for better meetings

Real-Time Visuals for Better Meetings

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Through the power of real-time visual communication, SmartDraw makes planning and conducting meetings much more efficient and productive—saving both time and money.

Reduce average meeting time by more than 25%.

Achieve clarity and consensus faster.

Eliminate the seemingly endless cycle of revisions and follow-up meetings.

As a visual processor, SmartDraw makes creating real-time visuals possible for everyone. Using SmartDraw’s meeting templates, tasks can be easily assigned and accounted for and project plans can be created and adjusted in real time. This allows more quantifiable work to be accomplished during the meeting, eliminating the seemingly endless cycle of revisions and follow-up.

Introduction In the business world, time is a precious commodity. Businesspeople spend a lot of time in meetings. Not to mention time spent planning them and performing follow-up tasks. Successful meetings are collaborative, efficient, productive and empowering.

Unfortunately, most meetings are not effective. They don’t follow a well-prepared plan, tend to get off topic, and results are not easily verified. Time is wasted. Team members lose interest and feel unengaged. The benefit of collaboration is lost.

Real-time visuals are the key to successful meetings. They should be used for meeting preparation, presentation, information capture and follow-up. This provides tangible benefits to managers, allowing them to get the most from their team members’ valuable time. Using visuals provides a solution that can significantly shorten the length of the meeting cycle (planning and preparation, execution, and follow up).

It also allows participants to capture, in real time, the collaborative results of their meeting. This “live information capture” is made in an easy-to-use visual format. Decisions made, tasks assigned, and timelines for implementation are shared in a visual format for all to see. Everyone is on the same page. Nothing falls through the cracks. Live information capture using visuals provides tangible results. Meetings now have a measurable return on investment for companies that adopt its use throughout their organization.

Isn’t it much more productive to have team members actually working on project tasks to achieve their goals and objectives, rather than spending their time in meetings? Ask yourself this question: if you could make more time for your team, how much more could be accomplished?

Fortunately, today there is a solution that for the first time enables the real-time creation of visuals, which changes the face of meetings forever. It is called the visual processor.


What is a visual processor? A word processor enables anyone in your company to create nicely formatted written documents quickly and easily. A visual processor allows anyone to create professional-looking, automatically formatted visuals just as quickly and easily. There is no “drawing” required. In fact, you can even use the keyboard to create your visuals! With a visual processor, great-looking visuals are just as quick and easy to make as great-looking written documents.

There is no longer any reason not to use visuals as much as written words in all business communication (documents, presentations, emails, etc), including meetings.

SmartDraw is the world’s first visual processor. Until its introduction in June 2010, traditional graphics software was all that existed. Graphics software requires too much time, expertise, and design experience for it to be effective or useful for 98% of business users. With the breakthroughs of automatic formatting and the built-in “know-how” of the visual processor, anyone can create presentation-quality visuals in real-time, or in other words, “at the speed of thought.” It also provides, for the first time, the ability to capture collaborative information during meetings. This is done in real-time, so that everyone is on the same page. Meeting participants can discuss topics, brainstorm ideas, and make decisions that are instantly documented in a visual format. The visual documents can even be converted into a project plan with a single click!

Simply put, the visual processor reinvents business in many ways. Visuals are scientifically proven to be up to six times1 more effective than words alone in communicating ideas, data, information, processes, plans, projects and more. This improved communication leads directly to increased sales, lower costs, productivity gains, and reduced errors. That adds up to significant business performance enhancement.

This changes everything. The visual processor can create a variety of different visuals – all of the ones that are commonly used in business meetings:


Now, for the first time in history, the benefit of using visuals significantly outweighs the time it takes to create them. And the visuals created by the visual processor have built-in standards called visual grammar, so that everyone’s visuals follow rules that make understanding them much easier. This enables widespread adoption throughout the organization (and even outside of it with partners, customers and suppliers), much in the same way that written documents follow generally accepted rules of grammar and punctuation so that they can be easily understood by wide audiences. Traditional graphics software (like Microsoft Visio® and the Microsoft Office® drawing tools) are an impediment to the widespread business use of visuals, because their lack of automatic formatting means that it takes too much time, hassle and ultimately cost to make the return on creating them worth the effort. This is why so few business users have ever created a visual—in fact, less than 3% of all business communication uses visuals. They also cannot be created in real-time, causing extra cycles of transcribing, reviewing, and editing that waste time and generate poor results.

In fact, some organizations that are using the visual processor in meetings have even replaced their whiteboards and ad hoc note-taking with real-time documentation using meeting-specific visuals. Their results have been higher engagement and agreement by team members, and significantly decreased follow-up time required to produce essential meeting documents and project action plans. Capturing information visually and at the speed of thought translates into immediate team action and increased productivity.


More Productive Meetings In a survey of Microsoft® employees known as Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge (PPC), the results found that on average people spend 5.5 hours a week in meetings, and 71% feel that meetings are typically unproductive2. The survey also found that the most common pitfalls are unclear objectives, lack of team communication, and unclear priorities3.

That is a staggering amount of lost time that could have been prevented by communicating visually. All of the above pitfalls can be addressed from the proper planning of the meeting and employing the proper use of visuals to turbocharge the overall effectiveness of the meeting. A recent study from the University of Minnesota found that the average length of meetings in which visuals were used were 26.8% shorter (26.7 minutes vs. 18.6 minutes) than meetings in which no visuals were used4. So, by changing how your meeting is planned and run via visuals, the productivity and communication to the participants improves exponentially. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, time saved is money earned.

How do you make meetings both shorter and more productive?

Let’s look at the most commonly used tool – the meeting agenda. Meeting agendas are typically lists of topics and sub-topics for the group to discuss within the time scheduled. However, lists are limited in their ability to communicate. Using SmartDraw to brainstorm with mind maps and present an assignment view of a project, the meeting planner is now able to create better accountability. By brainstorming your meetings and projects visually, you can better understand and more powerfully communicate the topics and sub-topics and how each is interrelated within the overall discussion. With SmartDraw, you have the ability to change and revise any aspect of your project during the course of the meeting to properly and accurately record the discussions. Moreover, with the visual processor, accountability is created more quickly, clearly, and easily than ever before.

In essence, by using visuals instead of text-only lists and written documents, you save time in the preparation of the meeting and meeting agenda. The outcome is that you communicate effectively and thoroughly to the participants ensuring they understand the objectives of the meeting and the actions and priorities that result from it. This eliminates future meetings and discussions for the sake of clarity. Time saved and time well spent.

Meeting Agendas (assignment view)


Presentations Why is it that so many presentations are painful to sit through? Presentations are often disengaging, boring, and ultimately a waste of time (for the audience and presenter). In an online survey conducted by A Time to Market training centers, nearly 66% of the respondents said it takes about one to five hours to create a presentation5. So, if you are going to spend that much time preparing a presentation, why create it in such a way that leads your audience believing the presentation you worked so hard on is a waste of their time; and ultimately your time?

The problem is that so often presenters do not plan nor give their presentations visually. A visual presentation builds engagement and your audience walks away absorbing the information and feeling that it was time well spent.

So, what are the barriers preventing people from using visuals more in their presentations? In nearly every case the problem is the very tool that is supposed to have elevated the presentation – PowerPoint®.

Since PowerPoint® was introduced in 1987; a stack of bulleted PowerPoint® slides has become synonymous with "presentation." We've all sat through meetings where a co-worker reads the bullets from each slide of a PowerPoint®. Needless to say presentations like this are as ineffective as they are boring.

Why do most presentations follow this formula? Ironically, the main culprit is PowerPoint® itself. From the beginning PowerPoint® was designed to make it easy to type in a title and bullets. Creating a slide of bullets was the default action, and after a quarter of a century, it still is!

SmartDraw removes these barriers and places the power to create visually rich presentations into the hands of everyone. SmartDraw gives you a whole new way to create your presentation that reinvents the way you use PowerPoint®.

But creating a truly visual presentation means more than taking an existing text-based presentation and replacing some of the bullets with visuals. You need to think visually, plan visually, and compose your presentation visually. SmartDraw automates the creation of visuals to such a degree that anyone can do it, and get great results in minutes. Creating professional-quality visuals with SmartDraw is as easy as typing bullets in PowerPoint®.

But even the best visual can be ineffective if displayed in the wrong way in your presentation.

As presentation expert Rick Altman explains in his excellent book, Why Most PowerPoint® Presentations Suck and How to Make them Better, showing a visual to your audience all at once can be overwhelming. They will be too busy trying to absorb all the information to focus on the specific point you are trying to make. Rick calls this "drinking from the fire hose." Instead, it's better to reveal the visual in a series of steps. Rick calls this "sequencing.”

By stepping through the graph, your audience can follow the argument with much greater comprehension than just putting the whole graph in front of them in one pass.

Here’s an example:

We can show this graph in its entirety:


Or we can show it in a series of steps with commentary:

“As you can see we have seen a steady growth of smart phone sales over the past four years.”


“But it’s important to note that sales of normal phones have fallen off just as quickly.”

“We see clearly that total sales of all phones have actually grown quite slowly during this period. Smart phone sales have largely replaced regular phone sales.”

SmartDraw's presentation features totally reinvent the way you use PowerPoint®. Not only does SmartDraw make it easy to replace boring bullets with powerful visuals, it gives you a better way to compose, build, and manage all your presentations. The result is better, more effective presentations that are even easier to create and edit.

Effective presentations lead your audience to more quickly absorb the information presented, and leaves them satisfied that they spent their time well. And for that reason, your time spent in the preparation and delivery of the presentation is now appropriately well allocated and justified.


Email, Reports, and Communication Communication is at the core of all business and is the life blood of organizations. In the past, before word processors were introduced, written reports and documents were created only by a small pool of professional document specialists (typists). This meant the process of creating one was fairly time consuming, error-prone, costly, and involved a back-and-forth process between the person trying to communicate and the person creating the written document. The result was that written communication was not nearly optimal. As soon as the first word processors, with their automatic formatting and built-in know-how, began to show up on a large number of employee desktops a significant breakthrough occurred that changed business communication forever.

Improvements came in ways no one had ever imagined possible. For those who purchased word processors for all of their employees, the incredible return on investment became evident very quickly. But it still took time for some companies to see that they were quickly falling behind the times and losing their competitiveness. They resisted change, even though embracing and adapting to the change was clearly the right thing to do. In the end, word processors did end up on every business person’s PC.

Today, there are so many different ways people communicate both internally and externally in their businesses that it becomes paramount to communicate in ways that everyone can understand and do it in an expeditious manner. Visual communication is the language, and by leveraging the power of SmartDraw’s visual processor, it is now possible to break down all global language barriers and communicate visually by leveraging the power of SmartDraw’s visual processor. How?

SmartDraw provides you the ability to create professional-quality visuals such as charts, mind maps, and flowcharts in a manner of minutes. You can then export those visuals to a myriad of file formats or directly into your email client for immediate sending and delivery to those with whom you are communicating. No other traditional graphic software program can compete with SmartDraw’s quickness and efficiency. SmartDraw saves you time and energy in the creation of the visual, the sending of the visual, and the absorption of the information via the visual.

In a meeting, the real-time visuals created and edited in SmartDraw can also be instantly delivered to all team members via email, or checked into Microsoft SharePoint© so that everyone can access them the moment they get back to their desks.

Project Management Many projects are delivered late and over budget. More often than not, a project is doomed to be late from conception because of the flawed assumptions and estimates of the people managing it, and this is because the vast majority of people tasked with managing projects in their organizations don't have any successful method or process to rely upon. Many project managers simply "wing it" and the result is late projects. Time, money, and resources are wasted.


Typically, unsuccessful project managers plan projects something like this: identify a few broad, coarse tasks and arbitrarily produce an estimate based upon how long they think it will take. They do it this way because it's quick and easy, but the result is project timelines and estimates that aren't realistic.

The solution to all of these project planning and scheduling woes is to use a simple system that replaces off-the-cuff assumptions with facts and data, and to have it empower the project planning and team meetings. This keeps everyone on the same page. This is especially true if the project team is geographically distributed and interacts primarily over the internet (with a service such as WebExTM or GoToMeetingTM).

SmartDraw’s visual processor simplifies project management through its innovative project charts that ultimately will keep the project on time and under budget. The meeting agenda can be even turned into a project chart or timeline with a single click of a button.

Project management requires breaking down large tasks into a number of smaller tasks, estimating the completion dates of those smaller tasks, and rolling them up into estimates for larger tasks until you have a set of estimates for the entire project. Additionally, you must determine the order in which these tasks are to be completed and which tasks maybe dependent upon the completion of others so the project moves forward fluidly.

SmartDraw does this for you, automatically. SmartDraw creates and manages your project charts, no matter the complexity and size, easily and quickly so that virtually any manager can begin immediately. The manager now has at his fingertips an easy-to-use system to manage and track the various tasks and sub-tasks within the project so that everything maintains its schedule towards completion. Project managers who employ project charts via SmartDraw save more time than other project managers because their projects are completed on time and under budget. They are able to estimate more accurately their completion dates saving time and resources that otherwise would be wasted.

In business, there are often repeated projects and sets of tasks. Usually project managers must build new project tasks from the ground up every time the project re-occurs. This is more wasted time. Instead of requiring you to rebuild these projects, SmartDraw allows you to create your own custom


library of common tasks to reuse again and again. The libraries preserve the order in which the tasks must be completed as well as any dependencies among the tasks.

Conclusion

Businesses can never have too much time – which is why time, in all aspects of business, is so vitally important. And meetings can be one of the biggest time wasters in any organization. Businesses that think, plan, manage, and communicate visually are the ones that demonstrate how to recoup more time than those that don’t. That’s because visual communication should be easy, fast, flexible, and universally understood – this is especially true when it comes to meetings.

Until the invention of the visual processor by SmartDraw, visual communication wasn’t possible, because creating and editing visuals just took too much time to make it worth the effort. The visual processor makes real-time capture of information possible in a collaborative meeting environment (even over the internet using a service such as WebExTM or Go-to-MeetingTM. Only by leveraging the power of SmartDraw’s visual processor are organizations able to improve efficiency, optimize operations, improve communication and manage projects to meet deadlines, leading to real world time savings and measurable return on investment.

Here are examples of visuals being used by different departments of

organizations in various industries:

Sales (charts)

Marketing (assignment views, charts)

Facilities (project management)

HR (org charts, mind maps, flowcharts)


Finance (charts, mind maps)

Product Development (flowcharts)

Endnotes 1“Presenting Effective Presentations with Visual Aids,” U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA Office of Training and Education,

Published May 1996

2, 3Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge (PPC), Published 2005

4 “Documents and Writing Reports,” University of Waterloo, Department of Systems Design Engineering, Published by John S.

Zelek, P.Eng, Ph.D. 2004 5 “A Time to Market Online Survey,”A Time to Market (www.timetomarket.co.uk), Published 2010

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