Action item software. My team and programmes are ever expanding so wondering what softwarer people use to track action items and send reminders for follow ups. Tips and advice greatly accepted.
Graeme CardSenior Programme Manager - Strategy & Science| Gisborne District CouncilGisborne, Gisborne, New Zealand
My team and programmes are ever expanding so wondering what softwarer people use to track action items and send email reminders for follow ups, not just to me but to colleagues. Tips and advice greatly accepted. Outlook is not cutting it - at all-
Sounds like you are getting to the point where a portfolio-level solution is needed rather than an individual project one.
You could use a simple work management solution (e.g. JIRA) as most of these would have notification and escalation capabilities.
You could also hire a summer student to build a very simple database with MySQL or a similar no/lo-cost RDBMS and then use the native scheduling capabilities of the system it runs on to send out notifications.
Or the simplest approach might be to use a visualization technique such as making action items visible to all in an information radiator including their due dates and changing the color of the items when they get late to allow social pressure to encourage good behaviors.
Graeme,
There is an application called ActivityExchange used for the management and collaboration of thousands of activities. This is typically used for the engineering and construction industry. Contact me if this sounds of relevance.
Rgds Stel Saving Changes...
It is hard to say. Because I know nothing about your job and its details. Anyway, I think any kind of ticketing system like Jira can help. Do not forget to consider Smartsheet as well. Saving Changes...
Typically, we use Excel until things get to big at which point we build a database.
Moving to a database can involve some trade-offs. As you have found, the more personal approaches are very labor intensive. They do require more PM involvement however, so you are less likely to encounter surprises. Some team members love the DB because they don't have to talk to a PM, and can hide their issues such as continuously moving ECDs to prevent things going late, and not telling anyone. Automated emails are also the easiest thing to ignore, especially when they go to multiple people. With important action items, I send out personal emails to hand selected distributions so that it is very clear I am actively managing them, rather than just expecting people to update a database.
Before you transition to a DB, I would give careful thought to your configuration management of the data so you know who changed it and when, and how you expect to integrate it into your management process so people aren't just "feeding the machine" instead of managing projects. Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Graeme,
used action lists in Excel already 30 years ago and they still work. Some PM tools include the functionality of todo-lists or you could go to any standalone free or payed todo-app. I use MS todo (previously wunderlist).
Data privacy is an aspect, do you want the full team to see who is late how many times or do you want to keep this private.
