Level: Introductory Mike Taylor, Project Manager, IBM
29 Apr 2004 from The Rational Edge: Designed for tracking software requirements, Rational IBM Rational RequisitePro also has the flexibility to track organizational data as well as capturing and maintaining, plus generating and updating status reports.
Rational RequisitePro® is a great tool for tracking requirements through projects, but did you know that it has the flexibility to track other project and organizational data as well? It's great for capturing and maintaining minutes and action items from project meetings. It also provides an easy way to generate and update status reports. This article tells you how to get started.
Why use Rational RequsitePro for meeting minutes instead of plain old Microsoft Word? Well, let's suppose you use Word. You start by taking minutes, noting all the action items you want to assign to someone. So far so good. At the end of the meeting, you write up the minutes and distribute them. Fine.
At the next meeting, however, you need to discuss all those action items you assigned. Simply reporting "done" or "not done" is not really sufficient; you need to record what progress has been made and assign any additional action items that grew out of the original list. Further, people working on these items may want to record discussions about particular activities. As you hold more meetings and open and close other actions, your text editing features become really tedious to work with. Plus, over time, your action lists and discussion notes grow to pages and pages, obscuring the real "meat" of your meetings.
Does this sound familiar? If so, then you can improve the situation. If you're already using Rational RequisitePro for requirements management (or would like to), then you can also use this great tool to capture and manage those minutes and action items.
Tracking Action Items from Meeting Minutes
With Rational RequisitePro, you can set up a specific requirement type (e.g., ACT) to capture action items. The attributes for this type might include the following: assignee, priority, status, date opened/date closed, etc. Then, you can create a list of action items like the one on the left side of the screen in Figure 1.
Figure 1: List of Action Items in Rational RequisitePro
On the right side of the screen, you can set priorities, assign the action items, and then maintain a running report on the status of each item. This is a great benefit for all your team members. Instead of waiting until the next meeting to find out whether something is being worked on and what has been done, they can open Rational RequisitePro any time and find out.
To print out the latest minutes in your company standard format for distribution, you can use Rational SoDA. SoDA generates complete documentation by automatically extracting data from project databases — in this case, extracting the minutes and actions from Rational RequisitePro.
Tracking Projects and Customer Accounts
You can also use Rational RequisitePro to track the status of projects and customer accounts. Suppose you have a weekly meeting at which you discuss various customers and projects. Given that the discussion points are relatively static (i.e., the projects won't change from week to week), you can use a second Rational RequisitePro requirement type (CUS) for projects and customers, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: List of Customers and Projects in Rational RequisitePro
Then, to record progress on a project (customer), you can create a Discussion in RequisitePro (see Figure 3); the Discussion title should reflect the meeting date.
Figure 3: Creating a Discussion in Rational RequisitePro
If your Discussion notes include any new action items, you can add them to your ACT list and use the "Traceability" function to link them to the correct customer or project (see Figure 4).
Figure 4: Using the Traceability Function in Rational RequisitePro
Creating a Status Report with Rational SoDA
Once you have finished your weekly meetings, you can use the power of Rational SoDA templates to create a standard status report to send to team members and managers. The SoDA report template will prompt you for the date of the meeting and then do the rest, extracting the relevant (CUS) listings and their Discussions, as well as open action items from your (ACT) list (see Figure 5). Anyone who has ever labored over a status report should recognize what a blessing this automated tool can be for busy managers and project leaders.
Click to enlarge
Figure 5: Status Report Created with Rational SoDA Template
SoDA can provide different views of the data, too. To see (and print) all the action items for a particular project or customer, for example, you can use the "Trace Out-Of" view, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6: Rational SoDA View of Action Items for Projects and Customers
Conclusion
It's no accident that Rational RequisitePro and Rational SoDA serve as great tools for tracking and reporting status. The built-in capabilities for requirements analysis already include powerful ways to understand, manage, and continually view the status of what needs to be done in your software development projects. RequisitePro and SoDA give you easy ways to:
- Report much more than "done" or "not done" in your status tracking. You can record what progress has been made and assign any additional action items that grew out of the original list.
- Record discussions about particular activities, so that people working on these action items see a dynamic, up-to-date context for the changes that occur.
- Document current status via Rational SoDA through its integration with RequisitePro.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is simply a way to get started. The more familiar you become with Rational RequisitePro, the more you can explore your own techniques for status tracking and reporting.
Download
a sample Rational RequisitePro Minutes database.
About the author  | | | Mike Taylor first joined Rational in 1991 as a software engineering specialist based in Melbourne, Australia, where he helped clients pioneer OO best practices. After departing for five years to develop, lead, and architect object-oriented systems for other companies, including Boeing Australia, he recently returned to Rational to start a Brisbane office. His current interests focus on project management using iterative development techniques. He holds an Honors Degree in Production Engineering and Management from Brunel University, West London. |
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