Journal ·
What to bring to a first scoping call
Four things that save a week: the committee date, the sites in play, who owns the extract, and a list of column headings with no personal rows attached.
A scoping call is forty-five minutes. It is not a chemistry meeting. If you arrive with a deck about “our people journey,” we will be polite and still ask the same four questions.
The committee date. If the paper is in six weeks and the extract is a jumble, we will tell you the study will not be ready. That is kinder than a late pack.
The sites. “The whole group” is not a site list. Name the legal entities and the locations whose posts will appear in the pack. A newly acquired plant that still sits on a different payroll is a second study, not a courtesy page.
The file owner. One person who can send an extract and answer what a leave-reason code means. A steering group of eight cannot.
Column headings. Paste them into an email. Start date, leave date, leave reason, grade, site, hours, contract type. If hours are missing, we cannot talk honestly about FTE. If leave date is missing, we cannot talk honestly about tenure.
You do not need permission from communications. You do need permission to invite finance to working session two. A pack that only HR has seen will be rebuilt in the room, and you will pay for that reconstruction in lost time rather than in our fee.
If those four items are in the diary invite, the call can spend its remaining minutes on the actual question: freeze, restructure, winter cover, or a board that has lost confidence in the establishment table.