The dust has settled since our power-packed events – CWS Summit and the Collaboration in the Gig Economy — in Dallas. Now you’ve had time to catch up on email and settle back into your day-to-day job, but don’t fall into the trap of the daily grind. Rather than tuck those conference materials away, take steps now to ensure you reap the benefits you hoped to gain from your attendance.

Here’s a list of tactical and strategic the ideas gained from the events that can not only raise your program to the next level but help optimize your talent supply chain.

Identify changes. Review your notes while the events are still fresh in your mind and identify any changes or management tactics you were interested in pursuing. If colleagues attended with you, meet with them to compare your thoughts. Establish your priority list to determine what your next steps should be. What do you want to pursue now? A few months from now? Build out a schedule so time doesn’t slip away from you. Remember, the conference app is still active for a year. It’s a great way to reach out to someone whose business card you may have misplaced.

Changing strategy. As you prepare to make changes to the program or implement something new, make sure you contemplate your organization’s vision.  Perhaps writing a mission statement, evaluating your company’s current goals and how and where the program fits in will be helpful. However excited you may be about the latest in statement-of-work consulting, or integrating HRIS with a VMS, take stock. At the end of the day, any change effort needs to support the company’s goals, not derail them.

Building support. For larger-scale changes, begin to build your business case to secure executive buy-in, and set up teams of stakeholders. You would have heard it during the conference and I will say it again: Unless the program has adoption, it’s not going to work. So make sure you get your internal stakeholders on board and have an executive sponsor who can resolve problems that are escalated to him or her. Your executive sponsor should be able to get the attention of the company’s C-suite if required.

Suppliers are integral. You may be receiving calls or emails from suppliers you met at the event, so while you are building your strategies, keep in mind what you may wish to discuss with these contacts. Tapping their expertise is what will help elevate your program. But do your research. This is also the time to reach out to other program managers you met along the way. If you maintain those relationships now and continue building that rapport, months from now, as you’re launching your new change efforts, they will be better prepared to serve as your sounding board. Lessons learned from people who have gone down that path are invaluable.

For our part, we take and incorporate your feedback into our next conferences. We are already planning our 2018 CWS and Collaboration in the Gig Economy events, which will take place in London in April. By then, your program should be well on the way to implementing what you learned this month. We hope to see you in London to set the stage for your program’s next phase.

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