Dear all,
During the last big project I was running I was looking for a tool, which would from one side help me to track Issues, Risks, Agreements, Actions from the other side would allow me to generate professionally looking meeting minutes reports. My requirement was that if during a meeting the changes would be made to Issues, Risks, Agreements, Actions then these changes would automatically be inserted in a body of a meeting minutes report.
Why to track Issues, Risks, Agreements, Actions as a part of meeting minutes?
My experience shows, that in the environment of regular project progress meetings, these entities are the most important to track.
So, any way, having not found such tool on the market, I have now created one in MS Access 2007 database.
You are free to download it and to try.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/miraapt/ [1]
People often ignore meeting minutes, just because they are so boring and time consuming to make (especially if you want them to look fancy). However tracking everything which was agreed is even more boring and even more time consuming .
Yet, if you want to have a control of your project, if you want to make the things done and if you want to have the things changed – meeting minutes is a very powerful tool. If you have possibility to easily (with minimum extra efforts) follow and monitor agreed actions – it makes it a very powerful tool in hands of a Project Manager.
Tool comes with a manual and example database.
Features of a tool so far
1.1 Project status tracking (F001)
Tracks Project Status (text description), Issues, Risks, Agreements and Actions. Generates project report
1.2 Meeting tracking (F002)
Tracks meetings and generates meeting minutes .
1.3 Automatic insertion of project status change in Meeting Minutes (F003)
This is a main feature of a tool, which makes it different from a simple tracking spreadsheet.
If a status of Issue, Risk, Agreement or Action has changed (created, updated, closed) as a part of a meeting, then tool will automatically include the description of a change in meeting minutes.
So, if all changes to the database are done as a part of meetings, then the following will apply:
Current Project Status = Changes from Meeting 1 + Changes from Meeting 2 + …+ Changes from Meeting N.
Note: there is a flag in the tool, which you select to show, that change shall be recorded as a part of a meeting. It is also possible to do changes with no meeting being Active. In this case it will not be possible to generate Meeting Minutes report for this meeting, however Project Status report will still include all changes.
1.4 Linking of action (F004)
Action can be a standalone one or linked to Issue, Risk or Agreement
1.5 Support of multiple projects in one database (F005)
There can be many projects in one database.
Every issue, risk, agreement and actions is always associated with one of the projects.
If, for whatever reason, you cannot associate some of the actions with any project, just create a dummy project called “Project to track independent tasks”
1.6 Support of multiple projects in one meeting (F006)
Several projects can be updated as a part of one meeting. Meeting minutes report then will group changes per project So, therefore tool can be used both for individual project meeting as well as for review of portfolio of projects
1.7 Separation of application and database (F007)
Application is separated from projects database itself. So, when new version is released (new features, bug fixes etc), those who already use tool would not have to migrate data across to be able to use a new version of a tool, they can just pick a new application and use it to open old database file (this is assuming the database structure has not changed in a new version of a tool)
1.8 Switching between databases (F008)
You can have multiple database files (e.g. one database file for all projects of s specific customer or one file for Internal meetings and one for customer meetings). You can then switch from one database to another from within a tool (just like opening different file in Excel).
1.9 HTML reports (F009)
As opposite to standard MS Access reports, which can be saved without losing the quality only to *.pdf or to *.xps format, this feature allows creation of HTML reports, which can be then copied and pasted directly into the text of the email or any other program, which supports Windows copy and paste feature.
This feature is not using built in MS Access HTM reports feature, as the native MS Access feature does not produce a quality reports. Instead in MIRAAPT MS Access is used to generate HTML code directly. This allows production of high quality HTML reports.
Note1: this feature will not work without MS Word installed on the computer.
Note2: at the moment this feature is not available for project status reports