Now that you know about the importance of issues and how to create/ update them, let’s talk about how meetings and action items play an important role in the project.
When it comes to the nitty-gritty details required to get your project completed, there is no better way than clear, concise and documented communication with the team. And one of the best approaches is to have regular meetings, with tracked actions and decisions.
A meeting is a regular event (daily, weekly, monthly, etc) for project teams and can be with anyone – from communicating with the people delivering the work or discussions with the stakeholders who govern the project. These meetings typically cover items such as mitigation plans for issues, reviewing proposals, providing status updates, approving or rejecting variations, workshopping solutions, aligning project goals, etc.
To ensure you can hold each member accountable, the outcomes from your meetings should be recorded and distributed in the form of ‘meeting minutes’. These minutes are also useful when you need to inform those who didn’t attend the meeting about the updates, if you need to revisit the details to promote completion of actions or to have evidence of decisions that were agreed.
The easiest way to articulate it is that a meeting is made up of actions (tasks, decisions, etc) that are assigned to one or more meeting participants.
Now, what are the benefits of having Meetings?
It increases collaboration and effective communication with team members.
It helps build accountability and transparency within the project.
It helps assure that project outputs are delivered right and in high quality.
And, how would Action Items help in Meetings?
They give every meeting a clear purpose.
They help you establish clear expectations and priorities.
Priorities can be focused, therefore increasing personal productivity and project progress.
Being able to assign an action to a meeting and a risk, issue, change request, etc enables better tracking to drive your project to success
It also helps that all action items and meetings occurring in the course of the project are stored in a centralised repository. Not only does it help Team Members keep track of their assigned actions, but also provides an accountability if there are any initiatives done by the Project Team to work on each action.
This accountability is also useful for projects who dip into external vendor support, as there’s a need to manage their vendors as they help in achieving the project’s objectives.
Focus HQ can help you manage your meetings and action items so that you can work on the needed tasks to drive the project to success.
You can check the video below for a walkthrough of how to manage them in the Actions Tracking module.
Now, if you need to input a lot of Action items and you don’t have the time for it, you can add all of them at once via bulk upload. It’ll save you enough time and effort, and you can view all of them in one go. You can do so by importing a CSV file containing these Actions items.
To know more about Importing an Actions CSV file, you can check this video:
Please also visit the Focus HQ Support Portal for more details:
Feel free to start creating a Meeting Item in Focus HQ. Start by navigating to the Action Tracking module, and follow the video instructions on how to add a Meeting. Do the same for an Action Item. Once through, you can try importing Action Tracking items using a CSV file by following its instruction video.
If you have any other questions, you can reach out to us via the Focus HQ Help or send us an email to support@focushq.com. We’ll be happy to guide you in navigating through these and provide other valuable support links when needed.