The Meeting Unprofessionals
When National Business Travelers Association (NBTA) recently launched the Strategic Meeting Management Certification programme (SMMC), meeting planners had it coming.
Meeting planners have been asking for ‘a seat at the table’, suggesting that general management should recognize the importance of meetings and place meeting managers alongside such professions as Human Relations, IT and Procurement managers.
General management took a quick look and asked meeting planners how they take care of the company’s money, applying good procurement practices, for example. The meeting planner explained that buying meeting services is too difficult for the professional buyer, who doesn’t understand meetings, and the meeting services providers agreed; leave meetings to the professionals!
Management didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not knowing how to do your job is bad. Believing that you know something you don’t know, better than the professionals who know it, is deadly. The executioner is the professional travel manager who just launched the Strategic Meeting Management Certification.
Let us hope, for the sake of the meeting planner, that the General Manager has not asked any more questions, such as how do you manage meeting projects (online, of course), where are your quality assurance procedures, how do you manage risk? If a professional from any of these disciplines were to audit the average meeting planner, the meeting planner would be dead again, several times over. There are exceptions of course, like every reader of this blogpost.
Back to Strategic Meeting Management. What is it? In principle it is the application of good procurement principles to the total meetings spend across a corporation. In practice it means procedures whereby all meetings are registered and centrally approved, purchases are made from approved suppliers according to contracting policies and all payments are made through a system which captures and categorises spend. As a result, savings in the order of 15 – 30% are being reported by large corporations after implementing SMMP.
All of this was explained at the recent Paragon/NBTA Crossroads conference in Paris. I didn’t see many meeting planners there, but you may want to download Kari Kesler’s ‘Diving in to Strategic Meetings Management Programmes (SMMP)' (http://tinyurl.com/crossroadsparis) or check out some of the SMMP white papers on www.nbta.org.
Meeting planners have been asking for ‘a seat at the table’, suggesting that general management should recognize the importance of meetings and place meeting managers alongside such professions as Human Relations, IT and Procurement managers.
General management took a quick look and asked meeting planners how they take care of the company’s money, applying good procurement practices, for example. The meeting planner explained that buying meeting services is too difficult for the professional buyer, who doesn’t understand meetings, and the meeting services providers agreed; leave meetings to the professionals!
Management didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not knowing how to do your job is bad. Believing that you know something you don’t know, better than the professionals who know it, is deadly. The executioner is the professional travel manager who just launched the Strategic Meeting Management Certification.
Let us hope, for the sake of the meeting planner, that the General Manager has not asked any more questions, such as how do you manage meeting projects (online, of course), where are your quality assurance procedures, how do you manage risk? If a professional from any of these disciplines were to audit the average meeting planner, the meeting planner would be dead again, several times over. There are exceptions of course, like every reader of this blogpost.
Back to Strategic Meeting Management. What is it? In principle it is the application of good procurement principles to the total meetings spend across a corporation. In practice it means procedures whereby all meetings are registered and centrally approved, purchases are made from approved suppliers according to contracting policies and all payments are made through a system which captures and categorises spend. As a result, savings in the order of 15 – 30% are being reported by large corporations after implementing SMMP.
All of this was explained at the recent Paragon/NBTA Crossroads conference in Paris. I didn’t see many meeting planners there, but you may want to download Kari Kesler’s ‘Diving in to Strategic Meetings Management Programmes (SMMP)' (http://tinyurl.com/crossroadsparis) or check out some of the SMMP white papers on www.nbta.org.
posted by Elling Hamso at
Friday, May 29, 2009
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