Scope stopped growing behind everyone's back
A programme running almost a year, with dozens of meetings recorded and transcribed and several companies involved. The knowledge sat in hundreds of pages nobody was going to read again.
The challenge
A long industrial modernisation, several companies inside it, and a scope that widened meeting by meeting. Sessions were recorded and transcribed, so the knowledge existed: it sat in hundreds of pages of transcript that, in all honesty, nobody was ever going to open again.
Commitments made in each session got lost between the minutes and the next meeting. And scope changes were never really discussed, because nobody had the list of what had been added in front of them: it was an uncomfortable feeling, not a fact.
On top of that, tracking each line of work went through the leadership team, three people who ended up being the bottleneck for decisions and for status, with the opportunity cost that carries for people who should be looking at the business.
Approach
We deployed Tresmeta, and the transcripts stopped being an archive and became sources of the project. Each one yields the tasks and commitments it contains, with the exact sentence they came from, and the manager of each line decides which ones go in.
That is the real shift: scope changes stopped being an impression and became entries with a date, an author and an associated cost. You can follow the thread from a decision to the action that carries it out and the result it produces.
We started with a real pilot project, one with plenty of history and documents, and built it out in full. You see it running on the client's own material rather than on a prepared demo, which is the only way to know whether the tuning works.
And the tuning was most of the work. Every sector names things differently: a case file in an industrial company does not mean the same as it does elsewhere. We configured which entities the system should recognise, which reviews make sense here, and which user profiles are needed, because whoever looks at the project from management, from engineering or from finance does not need to see the same thing.
- Meeting transcripts turned into project sources rather than dead files
- Tasks and commitments extracted with the exact sentence they came from
- A human decision on every proposal: each line manager accepts, corrects or discards
- Scope changes recorded with date, author and associated cost
- Traceability from decision to action to result, with the whole thread visible
- A pilot on a real project with history, not on a prepared demo
- The system's entities tuned to the sector's vocabulary
- Three user profiles configured: management, technical and financial
Key outcomes
−20%
of meeting time spent going over the status of things: status is now looked up, not recited.
+15%
more tasks closed between one meeting and the next.
30+
office staff affected by the change in how the work is run.
0
commitments without an origin: every task and every scope change keeps the exact sentence it came from.
Those two figures come from the tracking of the project itself and are partial, because the programme is still running. They belong together on purpose: meeting less to talk about status is worth nothing if less work gets done, and what matters is that both move the right way at the same time. Alongside them there is a change with no number attached: scope changes are now discussed with the list in front of everyone rather than on intuition, and the status of each line can be checked without going through the leadership team.
Why it needed tuning
A system that interprets the meaning of what is said in a meeting does not behave the same everywhere. The same sentence can be a firm commitment, a loose idea or an out-of-scope request depending on who says it and in what context. That tuning — which entities to recognise, which reviews make sense, what each profile needs to see — is the difference between a tool that helps and one that adds noise.
Got a process that hurts?
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