Quorum visual workspace

The recent BPPM show in London was fairly predictably skewed towards software and training providers - but there were one or two notable exceptions. One of the most interesting products on show was Quorum - positioned as a tool to improve the effectiveness of meetings, it’s a device that allows multiple participants to annotate documents displayed on a projector or large screen using pen tablets.

It’s one of those ideas that’s incredibly simple, yet deceptively powerful. The device sits on your network, and acts as a virtual printer - you simply print your file to it, whether it’s a presentation, spreadsheet, photo, graphic or whatever - and it can then be displayed and annotated as if it were pinned to a flip chart. There’s a built-in webserver, and each participant has a pen tablet which they can use to draw in their own colour on the screen or projector.

What makes the Quorum particularly useful is the way that several boxes can work together across a wide area network - so it can bring another dimension to video conferences by enabling documents to be viewed and annotated across locations. The demonstration examples were a good indication of how useful it could potentially be - marking out an area on an aerial photograph, for example, or jotting down bullet points. The old saying that a picture’s worth a thousand words is often true - and Quorum enables users to point at and highlight exactly what they’re talking about. “No, not that one - this one.” You could also get participants to literally sign off the finished document, which can then be downloaded directly from the Quorum box as a PDF file.

I think that could be a particularly powerful tool in the project manager’s arsenal - getting commitment to stick after the meeting has finished can sometimes be a problem, particularly if there’s a significant interval between the meeting itself and the minutes and actions being issued. Signing off on a document during the meeting can be a good way of creating a psychological contract with the participants, and this could be a neat way of achieving that.

The units don’t come cheap at around £4,000 a time, but that has to be set against the very real cost of the participants in a meeting - it doesn’t need too many people to be involved before a few minutes saved here and there starts to add up to a significant amount. While digital whiteboards have been around for a while, the combination of the ease of use, virtual printing and downloads adds up to something which could be of real use in a live project situation.

Full details, specs and case studies are available online at www.quorumtools.com.

Filed under Project Management, Technical stuff, Working smarter |