Real-Time Visuals for Better Meetings

Real-Time Visuals for Better
Meetings

9909 Mira Mesa Blvd.
San Diego, CA 92131
Phone: 858-225-3374
Toll Free: 800-817-4271
Fax: 858-225-3390
www.smartdraw.com

Through the power of real-time visual
communication, SmartDraw makes planning
and conducting meetings much more efficient
and productive—saving both time and money.

 Reduce average meeting time by more
than 25%.
 Achieve clarity and consensus faster.
 Eliminate the seemingly endless cycle of
revisions and follow-up meetings.

As a visual processor, SmartDraw makes creating real-time visuals possible for everyone. Using
SmartDraw’s meeting templates, tasks can be easily assigned and accounted for and project plans can
be created and adjusted in real time. This allows more quantifiable work to be accomplished during the
meeting, eliminating the seemingly endless cycle of revisions and follow-up.

Introduction
In the business world, time is a precious commodity. Businesspeople spend a lot of time in meetings.
Not to mention time spent planning them and performing follow-up tasks. Successful meetings are
collaborative, efficient, productive and empowering.
Unfortunately, most meetings are not effective. They don’t follow a well-prepared plan, tend to get off
topic, and results are not easily verified. Time is wasted. Team members lose interest and feel
unengaged. The benefit of collaboration is lost.
Real-time visuals are the key to successful meetings. They should be used for meeting preparation,
presentation, information capture and follow-up. This provides tangible benefits to managers, allowing
them to get the most from their team members’ valuable time. Using visuals provides a solution that
can significantly shorten the length of the meeting cycle (planning and preparation, execution, and
follow up).
It also allows participants to capture, in real time, the collaborative results of their meeting. This “live
information capture” is made in an easy-to-use visual format. Decisions made, tasks assigned, and
timelines for implementation are shared in a visual format for all to see. Everyone is on the same page.
Nothing falls through the cracks. Live information capture using visuals provides tangible results.
Meetings now have a measurable return on investment for companies that adopt its use throughout
their organization.
Isn’t it much more productive to have team members actually working on project tasks to achieve their
goals and objectives, rather than spending their time in meetings? Ask yourself this question: if you
could make more time for your team, how much more could be accomplished?
Fortunately, today there is a solution that for the first time enables the real-time creation of visuals,
which changes the face of meetings forever. It is called the visual processor.

2 www.smartdraw.com 800-817-4271 ©2012 SmartDraw, LLC. All rights reserved.

What is a visual processor?
A word processor enables anyone in
your company to create nicely
formatted written documents quickly
and easily. A visual processor allows
anyone to create professional-looking,
automatically formatted visuals just as
quickly and easily. There is no
“drawing” required. In fact, you can
even use the keyboard to create your
visuals! With a visual processor, great-
looking visuals are just as quick and
easy to make as great-looking written
documents.
There is no longer any reason not to use visuals as much as written words in all business
communication (documents, presentations, emails, etc), including meetings.
SmartDraw is the world’s first visual processor. Until its introduction in June 2010, traditional graphics
software was all that existed. Graphics software requires too much time, expertise, and design
experience for it to be effective or useful for 98% of business users. With the breakthroughs of
automatic formatting and the built-in “know-how” of the visual processor, anyone can create
presentation-quality visuals in real-time, or in other words, “at the speed of thought.” It also provides,
for the first time, the ability to capture collaborative information during meetings. This is done in real-
time, so that everyone is on the same page. Meeting participants can discuss topics, brainstorm ideas,
and make decisions that are instantly documented in a visual format. The visual documents can even
be converted into a project plan with a single click!

Simply put, the visual processor reinvents business in many ways. Visuals are scientifically proven to be
up to six times1 more effective than words alone in communicating ideas, data, information, processes,
plans, projects and more. This improved communication leads directly to increased sales, lower costs,
productivity gains, and reduced errors. That adds up to significant business performance
enhancement.
This changes everything. The visual processor can create a variety of different visuals – all of the ones
that are commonly used in business meetings:


Now, for the first time in history, the benefit of using visuals significantly outweighs the time it takes to
create them. And the visuals created by the visual processor have built-in standards called visual
grammar, so that everyone’s visuals follow rules that make understanding them much easier. This
enables widespread adoption throughout
the organization (and even outside of it
with partners, customers and suppliers),
much in the same way that written
documents follow generally accepted
rules of grammar and punctuation so that
they can be easily understood by wide
audiences.

Traditional graphics software (like Microsoft Visio® and the Microsoft Office® drawing tools) are an
impediment to the widespread business use of visuals, because their lack of automatic formatting
means that it takes too much time, hassle and ultimately cost to make the return on creating them
worth the effort. This is why so few business users have ever created a visual—in fact, less than 3% of
all business communication uses visuals. They also cannot be created in real-time, causing extra cycles
of transcribing, reviewing, and editing that waste time and generate poor results.
In fact, some organizations that are using the visual processor in meetings have even replaced their
whiteboards and ad hoc note-taking with real-time documentation using meeting-specific visuals. Their
results have been higher engagement and agreement by team members, and significantly decreased
follow-up time required to produce essential meeting documents and project action plans. Capturing
information visually and at the speed of thought translates into immediate team action and increased
productivity.


More Productive Meetings
In a survey of Microsoft® employees known as Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge (PPC),
the results found that on average people spend 5.5 hours a week in meetings, and 71% feel that
meetings are typically unproductive2. The survey also found that the most common pitfalls are unclear
objectives, lack of team communication, and unclear priorities3.
That is a staggering amount of lost time that could have been prevented by communicating visually. All
of the above pitfalls can be addressed from the proper planning of the meeting and employing the
proper use of visuals to turbocharge the overall effectiveness of the meeting. A recent study from the
University of Minnesota found that the average length of meetings in which visuals were used were
26.8% shorter (26.7 minutes vs. 18.6 minutes) than meetings in which no visuals were used4. So, by
changing how your meeting is planned and run via visuals, the productivity and communication to the
participants improves exponentially. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, time saved is money earned.
How do you make meetings both shorter and more productive?
Let’s look at the most commonly used tool – the meeting agenda. Meeting agendas are typically lists of
topics and sub-topics for the group to discuss within the time scheduled. However, lists are limited in
their ability to communicate. Using SmartDraw to brainstorm with mind maps and present an
assignment view of a project, the meeting planner is now able to create better accountability. By
brainstorming your meetings and projects visually, you can better understand and more powerfully
communicate the topics and sub-topics and how each is interrelated within the overall discussion.
With SmartDraw, you have the ability to change and revise any aspect of your project during the
course of the meeting to properly and accurately record the discussions. Moreover, with the visual
processor, accountability is created more quickly, clearly, and easily than ever before.
In essence, by using visuals instead of text-only lists and written documents, you save time in the
preparation of the meeting and meeting agenda. The outcome is that you communicate effectively and
thoroughly to the participants ensuring they understand the objectives of the meeting and the actions
and priorities that result from it. This eliminates future meetings and discussions for the sake of clarity.
Time saved and time well spent.
Meeting Agendas (assignment view)


Presentations
Why is it that so many presentations are painful to sit through? Presentations are often disengaging,
boring, and ultimately a waste of time (for the audience and presenter). In an online survey conducted
by A Time to Market training centers, nearly 66% of the respondents said it takes about one to five
hours to create a presentation5. So, if you are going to spend that much time preparing a presentation,
why create it in such a way that leads your audience believing the presentation you worked so hard on
is a waste of their time; and ultimately your time?
The problem is that so often presenters do not plan nor give their presentations visually. A visual
presentation builds engagement and your audience walks away absorbing the information and feeling
that it was time well spent.
So, what are the barriers preventing people from using visuals more in their presentations? In nearly
every case the problem is the very tool that is supposed to have elevated the presentation –
PowerPoint®.
Since PowerPoint® was introduced in 1987; a stack of bulleted PowerPoint® slides has become
synonymous with "presentation." We've all sat through meetings where a co-worker reads the bullets
from each slide of a PowerPoint®. Needless to say presentations like this are as ineffective as they are
boring.
Why do most presentations follow this formula? Ironically, the main culprit is PowerPoint® itself. From
the beginning PowerPoint® was designed to make it easy to type in a title and bullets. Creating a slide
of bullets was the default action, and after a quarter of a century, it still is!
SmartDraw removes these barriers and places the power to create visually rich presentations into the
hands of everyone. SmartDraw gives you a whole new way to create your presentation that reinvents
the way you use PowerPoint®.
But creating a truly visual presentation means more than taking an existing text-based presentation
and replacing some of the bullets with visuals. You need to think visually, plan visually, and compose
your presentation visually. SmartDraw automates the creation of visuals to such a degree that anyone
can do it, and get great results in minutes. Creating professional-quality visuals with SmartDraw is as
easy as typing bullets in PowerPoint®.
But even the best visual can be ineffective if displayed in the wrong way in your presentation.
As presentation expert Rick Altman explains in his excellent book, Why Most PowerPoint®
Presentations Suck and How to Make them Better, showing a visual to your audience all at once can be
overwhelming. They will be too busy trying to absorb all the information to focus on the specific point
you are trying to make. Rick calls this "drinking from the fire hose." Instead, it's better to reveal the
visual in a series of steps. Rick calls this "sequencing.”
By stepping through the graph, your audience can follow the argument with much greater
comprehension than just putting the whole graph in front of them in one pass.

Here’s an example:
We can show this graph in its entirety:


Or we can show it in a series of steps with commentary:

“As you can see we have seen a steady growth of smart phone sales over the past four years.”


“But it’s important to note that sales of normal phones have fallen off just as quickly.”

“We see clearly that total sales of all phones have actually grown quite slowly during this period. Smart
phone sales have largely replaced regular phone sales.”

SmartDraw's presentation features totally reinvent the way you use PowerPoint®. Not only does
SmartDraw make it easy to replace boring bullets with powerful visuals, it gives you a better way to
compose, build, and manage all your presentations. The result is better, more effective presentations
that are even easier to create and edit.
Effective presentations lead your audience to more quickly absorb the information presented, and
leaves them satisfied that they spent their time well. And for that reason, your time spent in the
preparation and delivery of the presentation is now appropriately well allocated and justified.


Email, Reports, and Communication
Communication is at the core of all business
and is the life blood of organizations. In the
past, before word processors were
introduced, written reports and documents
were created only by a small pool of
professional document specialists (typists).
This meant the process of creating one was
fairly time consuming, error-prone, costly,
and involved a back-and-forth process
between the person trying to communicate
and the person creating the written
document. The result was that written
communication was not nearly optimal. As
soon as the first word processors, with their
automatic formatting and built-in know-how, began to show up on a large number of employee
desktops a significant breakthrough occurred that changed business communication forever.
Improvements came in ways no one had ever imagined possible. For those who purchased word
processors for all of their employees, the incredible return on investment became evident very quickly.
But it still took time for some companies to see that they were quickly falling behind the times and
losing their competitiveness. They resisted change, even though embracing and adapting to the change
was clearly the right thing to do. In the end, word processors did end up on every business person’s PC.
Today, there are so many different ways people communicate both internally and externally in their
businesses that it becomes paramount to communicate in ways that everyone can understand and do
it in an expeditious manner. Visual communication is the language, and by leveraging the power of
SmartDraw’s visual processor, it is now possible to break down all global language barriers and
communicate visually by leveraging the power of SmartDraw’s visual processor. How?
SmartDraw provides you the ability to create professional-quality visuals such as charts, mind maps,
and flowcharts in a manner of minutes. You can then export those visuals to a myriad of file formats or
directly into your email client for immediate sending and delivery to those with whom you are
communicating. No other traditional graphic software program can compete with SmartDraw’s
quickness and efficiency. SmartDraw saves you time and energy in the creation of the visual, the
sending of the visual, and the absorption of the information via the visual.
In a meeting, the real-time visuals created and edited in SmartDraw can also be instantly delivered to
all team members via email, or checked into Microsoft SharePoint© so that everyone can access them
the moment they get back to their desks.

Project Management
Many projects are delivered late and over budget. More often than not, a project is doomed to be late
from conception because of the flawed assumptions and estimates of the people managing it, and this
is because the vast majority of people tasked with managing projects in their organizations don't have
any successful method or process to rely upon. Many project managers simply "wing it" and the result
is late projects. Time, money, and resources are wasted.


Typically, unsuccessful project managers plan projects something like this: identify a few broad, coarse
tasks and arbitrarily produce an estimate based upon how long they think it will take. They do it this
way because it's quick and easy, but the result is project timelines and estimates that aren't realistic.
The solution to all of these project planning and scheduling woes is to use a simple system that
replaces off-the-cuff assumptions with facts and data, and to have it empower the project planning
and team meetings. This keeps everyone on the same page. This is especially true if the project team is
geographically distributed and interacts primarily over the internet (with a service such as WebExTM or
GoToMeetingTM).
SmartDraw’s visual processor
simplifies project management
through its innovative project charts
that ultimately will keep the project
on time and under budget. The
meeting agenda can be even turned
into a project chart or timeline with
a single click of a button.
Project management requires
breaking down large tasks into a
number of smaller tasks, estimating
the completion dates of those
smaller tasks, and rolling them up
into estimates for larger tasks until
you have a set of estimates for the
entire project. Additionally, you
must determine the order in which
these tasks are to be completed and
which tasks maybe dependent upon
the completion of others so the project moves forward fluidly.
SmartDraw does this for you,
automatically. SmartDraw creates
and manages your project charts,
no matter the complexity and size,
easily and quickly so that virtually
any manager can begin
immediately. The manager now has
at his fingertips an easy-to-use
system to manage and track the
various tasks and sub-tasks within
the project so that everything
maintains its schedule towards completion. Project managers who employ project charts via
SmartDraw save more time than other project managers because their projects are completed on time
and under budget. They are able to estimate more accurately their completion dates saving time and
resources that otherwise would be wasted.
In business, there are often repeated projects and sets of tasks. Usually project managers must build
new project tasks from the ground up every time the project re-occurs. This is more wasted time.
Instead of requiring you to rebuild these projects, SmartDraw allows you to create your own custom


library of common tasks to reuse again and again. The libraries preserve the order in which the tasks
must be completed as well as any dependencies among the tasks.

Conclusion
Businesses can never have too much time – which is why time, in all aspects of business, is so vitally
important. And meetings can be one of the biggest time wasters in any organization. Businesses that
think, plan, manage, and communicate visually are the ones that demonstrate how to recoup more
time than those that don’t. That’s because visual communication should be easy, fast, flexible, and
universally understood – this is especially true when it comes to meetings.
Until the invention of the visual processor by SmartDraw, visual communication wasn’t possible,
because creating and editing visuals just took too much time to make it worth the effort. The visual
processor makes real-time capture of information possible in a collaborative meeting environment
(even over the internet using a service such as WebExTM or Go-to-MeetingTM. Only by leveraging the
power of SmartDraw’s visual processor are organizations able to improve efficiency, optimize
operations, improve communication and manage projects to meet deadlines, leading to real world
time savings and measurable return on investment.

Here are examples of visuals being used by different departments of
organizations in various industries:

Sales (charts) Marketing (assignment views, charts)

Facilities (project management) HR (org charts, mind maps, flowcharts)


Finance (charts, mind maps) Product Development (flowcharts)

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SmartDraw for free by how easy it is to conduct a of our product specialists,
clicking here. visual meeting with click here or call us at 800-
SmartDraw, click here. 817-4271

Endnotes
1
“Presenting Effective Presentations with Visual Aids,” U.S. Department of Labor, OSHA Office of Training and Education,
Published May 1996
2, 3
Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge (PPC), Published 2005
4
“Documents and Writing Reports,” University of Waterloo, Department of Systems Design Engineering, Published by John S.
Zelek, P.Eng, Ph.D. 2004
5
“A Time to Market Online Survey,”A Time to Market (www.timetomarket.co.uk), Published 2010


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