Before you embark on a company-wide, conference room booking project, it’s important to understand the scope. The complexity of implementing room booking software will depend more on existing and desired room booking processes than on number of rooms or locations.
However, many times, if the company has never had scheduling software, both the existing and desired processes are unknown.
Questions like these will need to be answered:
- Do you have self-managed or managed rooms or both?
- Do you have different rules or assignments for different departments, floors, locations?
- Do you have different equipment in different rooms?
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If this is the first time you’re implementing a company-wide room booking solution, you may not have answers for many of these questions. When things are done manually often there are unspoken agreements, understandings, or ad hoc rules for managing workspace. This will be the first time someone documents these workflows.
For example, does accounting on the third floor lay claim to the 10 person conference room adjacent to their offices? Has that led to other teams taking ownership of other communal spaces? Does that make it hard to find an available conference room in a hurry?
Implementing room booking software gives you a chance to solidify processes and policies and essentially democratize the room booking process. That’s why it’s essential to understand the current room booking process as well as the desired booking process.
- Do you want different departments to have access to certain rooms or will all rooms be bookable by everybody?
- Should some rooms be ‘managed’ rooms, meaning an admin or super user has to accept or reject the booking first?
In Condeco’s room booking software, we use ‘Groups’ to manage these rules. Companies can have as many Groups as required by the client, but each Group will have its own configuration and attributes. Since each Groups’ attributes are independent of the others, they can be configured to fit the needs of a specific business group, location, or division within the company.