Welcome to Process Leaves

Process Leaves will help you organize your time, your meetings, your work, and your knowledge resources.

Process Leaves are better than email. Email works fine when you need to send a note to someone, a file to someone, or even when you are sending to a group of people. Email is best when the communications is one way, but if you need to work together with a group, the separate messages get hard to track. You end up with lost of messages, lots of versions of documents, and it is hard to piece together the final results from this exchange.

Imagine a simple case of a sales proposal. Let's say that one person gets a hold of an RFP for a potential deal, and wants to know whether their organization can put together a competitive bit. Using email, the RFP questions would be emails to a group of people. Different people on the team will read through the RFP questions, and provide answers, and email the marked up document to everyone. Other may comment on, or extend the answers. Even in a small group you could end up with 10 to 20 copies of the RFP with various answers to various questions. When it comes to making a decision, it is hard to collect everything together in one place and to keep a handle on what is happening. Just receiving all the email and organizing it is a tremendous burden on each member of the team.

This is where Process Leaves comes in. Instead of starting with an email message, that person would start by creating a "Leaf". Each leaf has a goal, and the goal of this leaf is to "Determine whether or not to respond to the RFP". The leaf is a single place where everything necessary to reach this goal can be placed. The original RFP document is attached to the leaf. As people answer questions, the modified document is attached in place of the original, so when each person go to access, they always get the latest version. The main part of the leaf is editable by anyone at any time without needing anything more than a browser installed. Individuals can make and discuss comments about aspcted of the proposal. Action items can be created and assigned to people, and tracked through to completion. As actions are completed, the results are visible to all. In order to decide whether or not to respond to the RFP, a poll question can be constructed, and each person involved can register a vote for or against. Process Leaves keeps everything together in one place, so that it is all there and can easily be found by all members without having to spend endless hours wading through email.

Another use for Process Leaves is to help you run great meetings. Whether you are dial in phone conference or just a weekly local get together, Process Leaves can help you make your meeting more effective. When you are thinking about having a meeting, the first thing you do is create a Leaf for the meeting. On that leaf you put the date, time, agenda, meeting room, or call in details. All the people you want to invite to the meeting are added to the "member" role of the leaf. As people prepare for the meeting, they attach to the leaf any presentations they are planning to give at the meeting. No worries, if they want to change their presentation at the last minute, they can simply update the attachment with the latest revision. People attending the meeting can see the presentation just by cliking on a link, and there is no need for anyone to "promise" to send the documents after the meeting. During the meeting, notes are taken directly on the leaf. Others can review the notes, and suggest corrections, before the meeting has ended. As action items are identified, they are entered as tasks, and assigned to people. The worklist capability makes is easy for everyone to find those tasks until they are finally marked as completed. The leaf remains around as a permanent record of what was accomplished at the meeting and as a result of the meeting.

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