MEETING PROFESSIONALS INTERNATIONAL'S Global Corporate Circle of Excellence, a select group of senior corporate meeting executives, in June came out with the next thing on your summer reading list: a 12-page white paper outlining the process of creating a business plan for a strategic meeting management program.

The paper makes a case for an SMMP, warning meeting professionals to “avoid obsolescence” by adapting to the “new reality,” in which cross-department collaborations are essential and the business environment demands cost-consciousness and accountability.

The steps (highly abbreviated here) that the GCCOE recommends for reinventing a meeting department include:

• Understand your company's goals and culture, and the business environment in which it operates;
• Do a hard-nosed assessment of what your department brings to the table;
• Draft a preliminary business proposal;
• Consider preferred vendor contracts;
• Identify the tech tools that can improve productivity and data collection;
• Define success measurements for both individual meetings and the SMMP;
• Create a proposal for C-level execs;
• Refine the proposal based on feedback.

The full white paper is available at www.gccoe.mpiweb.org.