Action Items Overview

Use the Action Items activity center to create, track, and manage action items throughout the life cycle of a project. Project Center users can associate supporting documents, drawings, and email messages with action items, providing a permanent record of all action item-related information. Action items can also be related to other project items, such as meetings, markup sessions, or milestones.

The action items feature consists of three primary components:

The Action Items activity center in Project Center, which provides a centralized location for action items, who they are assigned to, related email correspondence, and supporting documents.
The Project Center Add-in for Microsoft Outlook, which enables all project team members to easily create new action items from email messages, file action item-related email, and view or change the status of an action item from the familiar environment of Microsoft Outlook.
The Action Items page on the Info Exchange website. Internal project team members can use any web browser, including mobile devices, to create and edit action items for their projects from the web.

Action items contain the following information:

Descriptive fields such as Subject, ID, Priority, Discipline, and Last Updated.
A Status, with values such as Not Started, In Progress, Deferred, Waiting on Someone Else, and Completed, which is critical in managing action items.
Fields for tracking accountability, such as Assigned To, Assigned By, and Due Date.

These action item fields enable project team members to use the Category drop-down list of the Action Item activity center to quickly filter the project action items list by common criteria such as All Open Action Items, All Closed Action Items, and All Overdue.

1 Open items are created for contacts who are assigned action items (or for the contact who assigned the action item if it has not been assigned). Also, Project Center sends out reminders for coming due and overdue action items.

Project Center Add-in for Microsoft Outlook

The Action Item activity center leverages email via the Project Center Add-in for Microsoft Outlook in resolving action items quickly and effectively. You can easily file email messages from Microsoft Outlook to action items allowing all project team members to contribute to action item resolution. When an action item is created and assigned, whether from Microsoft Outlook or from Project Center, an email message containing an action item-specific tag in its subject line is sent to the assignee and anyone CC'd in the Identify an Action Item dialog box. The purpose of the tag is to allow any responses to this and other action item-related email to be quickly and accurately filed to the same action item. All email messages filed to an action item are listed in the action item's Email Log tab. See File and Link Email Messages to an Existing Action Item for more details.

Supporting documents and related items

You can add files related to an action item as supporting documents and other Project Center items as related items. For example, if an action item is identified with a CAD drawing, and the drawing was marked up in the Newforma Viewer, and subsequently resolved through email with a .PDF sketch, the CAD drawing, related markup session, and published .PDF file could all be linked to the action item as searchable records of the action item.

1 Supporting documents are stored as links or shortcuts in the action item. Files are not moved or copied in the file system when added to action items as supporting documents.

Action item reports

You can output action item log reports to Microsoft Word, Excel, a web browser, in an email message, or to a .PDF file to be shared with external team members using the Create a Report dialog box.

Newforma to Newforma

You can share action items with other companies that use Project Center via Newforma to Newforma.