Our head office has fourteen meeting rooms, and over 2024 and 2025 we fitted most of them for hybrid meetings: a large screen, a camera bar, a ceiling microphone and a small touch panel on the table. Three suppliers did the work, so the rooms came in three designs.
Early this year our chief executive's assistant started timing the start of board and executive meetings, because she was the one apologising to the people waiting online. Over six weeks the average meeting began twelve minutes after its scheduled time. Almost all of that was the room. A laptop would not show on the screen, the camera pointed at the ceiling, the microphone was muted on the panel but not in the call, or the meeting had been joined from a laptop and from the room at once, so everybody online heard a howl of feedback.
None of this reached the service desk. A person standing in front of a room full of directors does not raise a ticket. They fiddle, apologise and eventually ring somebody they know in my team. Our records showed meeting rooms as one of our quietest services. Facilities owned the rooms, we owned the equipment and the suppliers owned the warranties, so nobody checked a room before it was used.
We now run the rooms as a service with a daily routine. An engineer walks every room before eight, starts a test call from the panel, checks the camera, microphone and screen, and logs the result. Firmware for the panels and cameras is updated monthly on a schedule, rather than whenever a supplier happened to visit. We replaced the oldest design, so every room now works the same way: walk in, press join on the panel, and the call runs from the room while the laptop only shares its screen. Each panel has a button that reports a fault straight to the service desk with the room name attached, and an engineer is present for the first five minutes of every board meeting.
The average late start fell to under three minutes. The panel button raises around thirty faults a month, nearly all of them problems we had never been told about.
A service that fails in front of people who will not raise a ticket looks like a service that never fails. We had been reading silence as health.
– Serguey Shinder
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