Track Phone Calls, Meeting Minutes and other activities in Project Timeline

Allen Preger, Newforma | 04/02/2008 | Comments: 0 | Views: 1487
Seventh Edition Eighth Edition

You can use the Timeline Activity Center to log phone calls, meeting minutes, tasks and any other project-related event. You can then display these events in a log, calendar, or dynamic journal view that can also be used to display project files or activities such as transmittals, RFI or action items by date range.
Here is how it works:
1) Start by logging the phone call or meeting event in the Project Timeline activity center as a project event. The list of event types you see below is customizable by your company:
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2) After adding a client meeting I am prompted to enter the details. Importantly, the Project Timeline is well integrated with MS-Outlook. You can drag meetings from an Outlook calendar or drag phone call entries from an Outlook Journal right into the Project Timeline. And if you have Outlook 2007, you can subscribe to the project timeline to view it from within Outlook:
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3) To keep certain Timeline views from getting cluttered, you can control what types of events get displayed where within the Project Timeline. For example, the Client Meeting I just added now appears in the Calendar view shown below:
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Since each team member may log several phone calls a day, phone calls by default do not show in the Calendar view above.
4) To view my phone calls, I can switch to the Event Log view, which shows all the Timeline project events in a list that I can quickly sort or filter to find what I am looking for. Importantly, as with other items in Newforma Project Center, you can add comments and links to supporting documents or related items to Timeline events:
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5) In the example below, the Meeting Minutes Word document was attached as a Supporting Document and action items coming out of the meeting were identified as related info:
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6) Best of all, if you then go look at the Journal view, you can instantly generate a chronological listing of ALL activities in the project by selecting any range of dates, weeks, months, quarters or years:
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The Journal displays any project activity that occurred within the specified period, including project files saved during the period, filed email that were sent during period, action items, RFI or Submittals that were created or closed during the period, transmittals that were sent during the period, meetings, phone calls, etc… 
7) You can filter activities by Type or Team Member to further refine your results. For example, if you want to make sure that your markups related to a recent RFI response had been incorporated into the source CAD files, you could filter to display only Markup Sessions, RFI and AutoCAD drawing activity during the period in question, as shown below:
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