We spend the majority of our time solving complex problems for clients, but our culture of continuous improvement sometimes leads us to internal projects that vastly improve how efficiently we work. Regardless of the wide variety of projects they are undertaking, our team members often have very similar needs–and that includes conference rooms. No matter what you’re working on, you’ll need to schedule meetings, collaborate with team members, and occasionally want to just find a nice, quiet space to be creative.

Pain Points

Conference-room scheduling is a pain point for most organizations as they grapple with limited room availability and juggling the needs of multiple teams that need to occupy those spaces. Scheduling the meetings themselves often requires human intervention to understand the nature of what each team needs, and then matching those needs with the proper conference rooms. Letting team members know the schedule for what meetings are going on in each conference room, when it will next be available, and quickly letting them book a meeting in a free room are communication problems that we can use software to solve.

The fundamental problem here is that you have two sets of data that you need to mentally reconcile before making a decision, but it’s difficult to evaluate them at the same time.

• Walk around and see what conference rooms appear to be empty. Even if no one is in the conference room right now, you can’t be sure that someone else hasn’t booked the room for the next hour.
• Sit at your desk and check the calendars for each room individually. Even if you find one that’s free, someone else may be occupying it at this moment for an important meeting even if they didn’t officially book the conference room on a calendar. Someone may also have forgotten to properly cancel their meeting, thus leaving an open room listed as occupied.

Making The Workday Better

Since we can easily view the schedule for a conference room and book a meeting at our desk, why can’t we just do those same things on a small tablet display mounted outside each conference room?

This way we could see the official schedule for a conference room while knowing if anyone is actually using it. There are existing solutions on the market that partially address these problems, but we wanted to build our own so we could have complete control over the experience and fully integrate it with various other smart office capabilities we’re developing. For instance, new facial-recognition technology will allow us to digitally greet arriving clients and guide them to the right meeting space by syncing with our conference-room tech.

The fundamental problem here is that you have two sets of data that you need to mentally reconcile before making a decision, but it’s difficult to evaluate them at the same time.

This way we could see the official schedule for a conference room while knowing if anyone is actually using it. There are existing solutions on the market that partially address these problems, but we wanted to build our own so we could have complete control over the experience and fully integrate it with various other smart office capabilities we’re developing. For instance, new facial-recognition technology will allow us to digitally greet arriving clients and guide them to the right meeting space by syncing with our conference-room tech.