Other key improvements include:

• The addition of a ‘go with the flow’ option at the end of a timed discussion. This horizontal thumb is for those that don’t have a strong opinion either way.
• Users can edit and delete their actions or learnings (Editing comments is coming soon)
• You have a greater choice of timer sounds…
  and we’ve changed the default too!

Subscribers to Lean Coffee Table will be the first to try our new agenda-based meeting boards, for free.

Many of our global customers have asked for an alternative meeting format for their distributed teams. The new structured meeting type will be highly interactive and visually simple, building on our Lean Coffee Table experience.

Online meetings are an increasingly important part of our time at work and yet they often fail to deliver the benefits they could.  Mainly due to a dull, traditional approach and limited tools.

Our vision is to change this by maximising the engagement and creative contribution of all participants.

We can achieve this using real-time interactivity, enabling multiple-contributions whilst maintaining a clear focus with a simple and pleasing layout.

The agenda-based meeting board will be released in a Beta version and will be free for our LCT subscribers for a limited period. We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.

In the future we will offer the new meeting format as an optional upgrade to your LCT subscription.

The benefits of our new agenda-based meeting board

• Engage attendees with a genuinely co-created meeting, rather than one that is facilitator driven.
  • Simple design maintains a clear focus, with real-time contributions and innovative ways to gauge levels of interest
• Maximise contributions by:
  • Helping attendees co-create the most engaging agenda by adding notes ahead of the meeting
  • Gathering contributions from attendees during the meeting, as they post links to articles or images to be included in the summary
  • Allowing attendees to write contributions, which were not possible within the agenda time limit.
• Make it easier for the facilitator
  • Create the minutes and actions in real-time, visible to everyone, then distribute a .pdf of the meeting minutes after it finishes.
  • Manage time with simple time and progress feedback.
  • Copy an earlier agenda for those regular meetings
  • Gauge levels of interest and engagement of attendees with the real-time ‘topic  thermometer’

Note: not all these features will be available on the first day.  We are most interested in getting your feedback on the early iterations and so are adopting the principles of an MVP (minimal viable product) to validate our assumptions and to learn as quickly as possible. Luckily, we have 1000s of users like you who will help us to do this.

The Lean Coffee Table team, as part of RippleRock Ltd. is very proud to announce we are now certified to the international gold standard of ISO27001:2013.

We invested our time in achieving this so that we can provide added reassurance to you, our clients. It turned out to be a valuable process, helping us to examine and explicitly define and improve some of our internal processes.

You want to know that your Lean Coffee sessions and data are safely stored, and we trust that the new ISO certification, together with the frequent penetration testing we undertake will provide you with that confidence.

Over the last year we have found ourselves completing long questionnaires for some larger clients who have a detailed Information Security criteria and an established purchasing process. ISO27001 should lower the bar to purchasing Lean Coffee Table by helping our customers ease the path through their due diligence processes.

More space to gather your topics

You now have a wider column to review topics before voting and discussion.

The application now loads with the wider column open. There are two ways to close this column and see the other discussion columns, the best way is to click on ‘Sort and move topics’ as this will reveal the other columns and then show the topics in priority order. Alternatively you can click on the arrow at the top right to close the wide column.

The facilitator can move topics around the column to cluster similar topics together and, yes,  you will soon be able to combine similar cards into one for voting purposes.

At the end of the session a .pdf Summary is posted back to the channel for a permanent record of the discussion.

To use Lean Coffee with Slack you need to:

1. Install the Lean Coffee Table application into your instance of Slack
2. Start Lean Coffee sessions from within Slack

Step 1 – Go to the Slack marketplace and install Lean Coffee

https://leancoffeetable.slack.com/apps/AC5RRA4N6-lean-coffee-table

Follow the steps which will vary, depending on whether you already have a LeanCoffeeTable.com account or not.

If you already have a LeanCoffeeTable Account

1. Login with your existing account information
2. Authorise LeanCoffeeTable.com to interact with Slack
3. … and start running your Lean Coffee sessions

If you do NOT have a LeanCoffeeTable account

1. Sign in with your Slack identity
2. Agree to the Terms and Conditions
3. Choose your plan, depending on how many Facilitators you wish to have running sessions
4. Authorise LeanCoffeeTable.com to interact with Slack
5. … and start running your Lean Coffee sessions

Step 2 – Create your first Lean Coffee session

Watch the video below for a more details on starting a session

From the Slack channel   Type /leanmeet <meeting name>

This will create a new session and board within LeanCoffeeTable.com

It will also put a link into the channel, enabling anyone to join by clicking on the ‘Go to Meeting’ button

At the end of the meeting the Facilitator can create a ‘Session Summary’ (.pdf), which is posted back into the channel

The Session Summary records all the; attendees, topics, actions, comments and a brief summary and looks like this.

Note: To create a session from Slack you need to already be a Facilitator within a ‘Coffee club’.
The Coffee Club was setup during the installation of Slack.  The person who set-up the Coffee Club is the ‘owner’ and they can invite people to join the club, as Facilitators.

Note: If you want a Lean Coffee session to exchange data with a Slack Channel, you will need to initiate the session from within the Channel – and not from LeanCoffeeTable.com