TIPS ON STANDARDIZING YOUR MEETING ROOMS

The idea of standardizing your meeting room estate across your global offices can be an intimidating one, and it’s true that to do it properly requires extensive planning and organization.

The positive impact this has on an enterprise, however, makes the effort well and truly worth it.

Having done just this for Shure’s global huddle room estate recently, there are a few tips and ideas that can help to make the process run more smoothly.

Key to the successful rollout of any project is making sure you have the right core team and that they understand the room requirements. We opted to build an internal AV team within the IT department to ensure we had the necessary skills. If doing this, it’s important to take time to build trust between teams, that way, further down the line when someone makes a specific request there will be the understanding that this is essential for the workings of the room rather than just personal preference. Once this trust and understanding is built, collaboration becomes much easier and the core team can work together on creating global standards to be implemented in every room.

Once these standards are in place, it’s important that the team knows its responsibilities but also respects its boundaries. So, at Shure for example, AV specialists are responsible for building everything in a specific room while the security networking team will be responsible for building the security into the room while also ensuring it can still speak to other rooms.

"This system works well for Shure when it comes to smaller huddle spaces, but larger conference rooms are more complex and involve integration with multiple vendors."

Dave Feldman, Shure

In this case, external contractors will be called in. They will be managed by the internal AV team who then collaborate with the network security specialists. Again, everyone needs to be clear about their role for projects to proceed as planned.

In today’s enterprise environment, every room is networked and every room is an AV room, so standardizing all these elements benefits everyone. IT support will spend less time troubleshooting and can refine their installation and upgrade processes, while end users benefit from a uniform experience no matter where in the world they are working. 

Keeping communication open and working closely with your colleagues will ensure this process is a smooth as it can possibly be, no matter how extensive your global estate.