The fourth step in getting the flavor of digital transformation for capital construction projects is how to replace inefficient project management processes with efficient ones with the least effort as well cost. Unlike the project communications templates that can be digitized as detailed in “Article #305 Getting the Flavor of Digital Transformation for Capital Construction Projects: Digitize Project Communication Templates and Registers”, those ineffective manual processes that need to be replaced without any question. Examples of those processes are meeting minutes, daily reports, punch list and safety incident process. For this article, the meeting minutes will be the process to be addressed.
One will never find a single capital construction project, regardless of its size, type, location or duration that does not require having meetings between the different project entities. Meetings are scheduled gatherings of individuals for stated purpose, to discuss and act upon matters of common interest. Meetings serve valuable purpose in the project to effectively communicate information, exchange ideas, render decisions, resolve issues, coordinate work, prevent problems among others. It is estimated that project management team members spend more than 50% of their time in participating in meetings.
In a capital construction project, there are many types of meetings. Those could include design review meetings, value engineering workshops, pre-bid meetings, tender opening meetings, kick-off meetings, progress meetings, technical meetings, contractor meetings, QA/QC meetings, HSE meetings, change management meetings, steering committee meetings, BIM coordination meetings, risk management meetings, interface management meetings, project handover meetings among others. The frequency of those meetings could vary as some could be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or on when needed basis.
The majority of construction capital projects continue to manage meeting minutes in a very ineffective and manual process. Although the business items discussed in each meeting will be always captured, nevertheless, what ends to be managed is mainly what meeting were held. There is no tracking or reporting mechanism on the status of the many business items discussed during those meetings and for which a responsibility had been assigned to close at a specific date otherwise they could impact the project’s progress and thus the completion date.
PMWeb Project Management Information System (PMIS) solution which was used to digital transform the document management, transmittal management, monthly performance reporting and digitizing the project communications templates will be also used to digital transform the meeting management process. The PMWeb meetings module is one of the many ready to use out of the box processes that are available in PMWeb. Those include the other inefficient processes of daily reports, punch list and safety incidents that need to be replaced.
All meeting minutes share the same requirements for what general data to be captured although the content of each meeting will vary from one meeting type to another. The first requirement for a meeting minute is that it needs to capture the particular of the meeting such as project, type, subject, WBS level, location, date, timing among others. Second it needs to captures the details of those invited to attend the meeting and who has actually attended the meeting.
In addition, the next or follow on meeting minute agenda can be generated from the current meetings to keep track of the history of business items from one meeting to the other. When the generate next meeting option is selected, all business items that are closed will be removed while on-going items will appear in the next meeting agenda.
The third requirement which is the most important of all, are the business items discussed during the meeting, who are responsible to address those business items and by which date, the status of this business item if it is still open or closed, the actual date this business item was closed and the project schedule activity that could be subject to be delayed if this business item is not closed as per the set due date. Of course, additional details such as business item category and type can be added to improve the classification of the business item.
Similar to other PMWeb modules, documents such as drawings, reports, pictures, videos, catalogues among others can be attached to the meeting minutes to ensure that they can be reviewed when needed. In addition, the meeting minutes could have links to other PMWeb records like submittal, risk register, changes among others that can be linked to the meeting minute. PMWeb also allows uploading documents as well as attach documents that are stored in PMWeb document management repository to each business item.
The meeting minute output format can be designed in any desired form and format using PMWeb business intelligence reporting tool. Nevertheless, PMWeb comes ready with it is own meeting minutes form that has interesting functions and features that manually prepared meetings minutes cannot have. The output form can be saved in PDF file format to be electronically shared or printed. Each meeting minutes output will have hyperlinks to the documents that were attached to the meeting minutes.
The meeting minutes output form has a hyperlink to the Meeting History report. When selected, a report will be generated detailing the history of all business items that continue to be open pending closure. A report that most project management team member wish to have instead of trying to go through the hundreds of meeting minutes trying to figure out what was discussed on those pending items and why they were not concluded until today.
The Meeting History report also it is own hyperlink which will lead to the reminder letters that can be issued to each project team member who has pending meeting business items assigned to him to her. The reminder or dunning letter will list all due business items assigned to the project team member. Issuing such letters will help in driving actions from those team members to respond and close pending meeting business items.
Similar to the other management processes that had been activated in PMWeb, the project center screen can be configured to display all those new management processes to be managed using PMWeb. Those are meeting minutes, daily reports, punch lists and safety incidents.
About the Author
Bassam Samman, PMP, PSP, EVP, GPM is a Senior Project Management Consultant with 40-year service record providing project management, project controls services and project management information system to over than 200 projects with a total value in excess of US $100 Billion. Those projects included Commercial, Residential, Education and Healthcare Buildings and Infrastructure, Entertainment, Hospitality and Shopping Malls, Oil and Gas Plants and Refineries, Telecommunication and Information Technology projects. He is thoroughly experienced in complete project management including project management control systems, computerized project control software, claims analysis/prevention, risk analysis/management (contingency planning), design, supervision, training and business development.
Bassam is a frequent speaker in topics relating to Project Management, Strategic Project Management and Project Management Personal Skills. Over the past 40 years he has lectured at more than 350 events and courses at different locations in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and South America. He has written more than 300 articles on project management and project management information systems that were featured in international and regional magazines and newspapers. He is a co-founder of the Project Management Institute- Arabian Gulf Chapter (PMI-AGC) and has served on its board of directors for more than 6 years. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (PMI), a certified Planning and Scheduling Professional (PSP) and Earned Value Professional (EVP) from the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and Green Project Management (GPM).
Bassam holds a Masters in Engineering Administration (Construction Management) with Faculty Commendation, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., USA, Bachelor in Civil Engineering – Kuwait University, Kuwait and has attended many executive management programs at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA and London Business School, London, UK.