Using a SharePoint Meeting Page to Make Meeting Agendas Flow

The Situation

All generating stations conducted morning management meetings by various names. Much of the time spent in those meetings was monologue in nature. Shift supervisors from the night shift told incoming management personnel what had transpired overnight, and incoming management personnel gave details of their departments’ intended work for the day.

The purpose was to kick off a productive and safe workday for the entire station workforce. This was of vital importance due to the interactions between the departments, especially those interactions involving Lockout-Tagout (LOTO) where operators removed energy sources from the equipment maintenance was to work on.

Other topics were covered in one fashion or another, such as what was transpiring at other stations around the fleet (so each station could learn from the safety and operating events at other locations). Weather conditions that could affect load demand were discussed also.

The Task

We set out to streamline the meetings with SharePoint to reduce meeting time and to make all information available at any time to employees with access to the network.

The Action

Since most of the information being communicated in these meetings was known prior to the meetings, or was available in documents somewhere online, we built SharePoint morning meeting pages that aggregated this information from wherever it was stored. The SharePoint solution would also allow contributors to post information during the night (and from afar) rather than waiting for meeting time to communicate information verbally.

We built the SharePoint pages to automatically display information in the exact order of the meeting agenda:

1. The day’s safety message, pre-populated by the Safety Professional at the beginning of each week.
2. The real-time weather forecast straight from the internet
   Items from the Fossil-Hydro Report, showing items of interest from other stations in the region.
3. Notes from overnight supervisors (mined from a new custom list).
4. Action items from the single station action item list (that were flagged as needing review every morning).
5. LOTO Requests for that day.
6. The day’s maintenance work schedule from an Excel file exported from the legacy work scheduling application

The Results

Because the SharePoint pages could be projected during the meetings, the meetings flowed more quickly. Additionally, plant management expected attendees to review the web page prior to meeting time so time could be spent asking clarifying questions rather than absorbing new information.

Meeting information was also now available to remote employees (such as traveling managers) and on-site employees that were unable to attend the meetings in person.

Meeting time was reduced so that managers and supervisors could get on to their daily work more quickly.