I think the HCSS User Group Meeting is a tremendous value but an attendee should protect the investment by making sure they take what they learned and implement it back in their office. In other words don’t fumble the ball going from UGM back to your office. Here are some suggestions to prevent the fumble:

  1. Monday after returning from UGM – Plan a week of short meetings to discuss UGM. Come together for the first meeting and create a shared document where each attendee can begin filling in from the classes they took two things they learned (can be more) that they want to bring into the HeavyBid workflow. Assign someone to download all available UGM files (even if no one was present for the class).
  2. Tuesday – each attendee reviews each class they took and fill in shared document the above. No meeting but no exceptions on all attendees working on the document.
  3. Wednesday – another meeting and block off an hour for this one. Each attendee should go over their two points and get a buy in from everyone on the feature that should be part of the workflow. In the same document make a section called “UGM Implementation Plan”.
  4. Thursday – just attend to the daily grind, but individuals review the plan.
  5. Friday – come together again and finalize the implementation plan and assign responsibilities if setup is involved.
  6. 2nd week back – meet Tuesday to discuss progress made on the plan. Meet Thursday to do the same and make sure everyone is moving forward. Fill out the implementation plan to make this a final document.
  7. Now review weekly the UGM HeavyBid (or any other of their great products) implementation plan. If your management was not at UGM include them in on the plan. They will see concrete results and will be more likely to approve the request to attend UGM again.

Want help reaching your goals? I can get you there a lot faster than you and the estimating team trying to juggle an estimating workload and at the same time work on improving the setup of HeavyBid. Contact me and we can discuss where you want to take HeavyBid.