| Articles » Eco-Friendly Project Meetings |
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Eco-Friendly Project Meetings |
| by Dave Paradi |
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| It seems that everyone is looking for ways to be more ecologically
friendly to our planet, which is a good thing. Can your project meetings
be more eco-sensitive? Here are some suggestions: |
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| Don’t meet if you don’t need to |
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| Weekly project
team update meetings are essential, so you can’t eliminate
those meetings. But are there other meetings on issues or detailed
work that could be done via e-mail discussion instead. If you are
meeting just to report the findings of your work and there is no planned
discussion, consider sending a one-page summary of ideas or action
plans by e-mail and save the time and cost of the meeting. |
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| Don’t meet face to face |
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| If your team, like many project teams today, are
geographically dispersed, consider holding some of your weekly project
team meetings or other meetings using video or web conferencing. Many
times when a document is being reviewed for input or updates are being
made to the plan, team members can save the cost of car or airplane
travel simply by using web meeting technology instead. With travel
being one of the activities with the greatest impact on the environment,
shifting even a few meetings to alternate formats can make a significant
impact on the environment. |
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| Print handouts on less paper |
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When you print handouts for your meetings, print on both sides of
the paper to reduce your paper usage by up to half. Always use the
options of your software program to reduce the number of pages printed:
- In Excel and MS Project, use the Fit to Page option in the
Page Setup dialog box to avoid printing one or two lines on a
new page.
- In PowerPoint, print four or six slides per page.
- In Word, use the option to print two pages per sheet of paper
(side by side) to cut the pages used in half.
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| Re-use or recycle handouts
that weren’t used |
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| If someone misses the meeting, make sure extra handouts
get recycled instead of getting thrown in the garbage. If documents
are printed on only one side of the page, re-use them by printing
on the blank side when the printout is only for your own use. This
can dramatically cut the amount of paper you use. |
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| Avoid handouts altogether |
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If most of your team has laptops, send handouts for
the meeting in advance and have people bring their laptops and refer
to the documents on their own screen instead of printing the handouts
at all. Having electronic handouts also makes it easier to archive
the project documents for future use by other projects.
As many experts have pointed out, the biggest impact we can have on
saving the environment is by each of us doing a little to help in
our daily activities. Use the ideas above to cut the environmental
impact of your projects and the whole team can feel better about not
only the outcome of the project,
but how it got done as well. And one more side benefit, you will probably
see a noticeable cost savings by using these ideas. |
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| For more information about project management or this article contact bia™ at info@bia.ca. |
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| © 2007 Dave Paradi |
