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Everything You Wanted to Know About Action Items
An
action item is work that requires follow-up execution.
By their nature, action items normally cannot be planned for in advance.
They arise on an ad-hoc basis during meetings or as a by-product of
working on something else. An action item is assigned because there is
not enough knowledge, expertise or time to resolve the item at the time
it originally surfaced.
In many cases, action items are trivial in nature, but in
other cases they can require substantial work to complete. Action items
need to be assigned, worked on later and completed. (If they are not
going to be completed, they should not be called action items. Instead,
simply note that the item will not be followed up on and then forget
about it.) Examples of
action items include forwarding information to someone,
arranging a meeting and providing a quick estimate on a piece of work.
Sometimes an action item is established to investigate an
area where there may be a potential problem. Because of this, action
items are sometimes mixed in with issues. However, this is not right; an
action item should not be confused with an issue. An issue is a problem
which will have a detrimental impact on the project if left unresolved.
An action item may lead to the discovery of an issue or a risk (a
potential issue in the future), but the action item itself is not an
issue.
There are two common approaches used to manage action
items. The best approach is to document the items as activities in the
project schedule. A resource and end-date are assigned as well, and the
activity is then managed and tracked as any normal activity on the
schedule. In general,
this is the better approach to follow, because it keeps the work items
in one place and allows the project manager to enforce the discipline of
knowing ‘if it’s not on the schedule, it will not be worked on.’ This
approach also allows the project manager to see the impact of the action
items on the schedule. For instance, you may have a small action item
that is 3 hours of work. If you assign this action item to a person on
the critical path, you may see the resulting delay to your project.
This may result in you assigning the action item to someone else
instead.
The second approach is to create a section on your
meeting minutes for action items. Action items can be placed here if
they are trivial (less than two hours) and they are scheduled to be
completed by the next meeting. If you use this technique you can start
each meeting with a review of the prior action items to validate that
they are completed and then cross them off the list.
Don't Mix Issues and
Action Items on the Same Log
In many cases, project managers are not using the Issues
Log to identify and track true issues. Many items that are classified as
issues are really risks (potential problems) or just action items.
If you find that your Issues Log has dozens of items on it, you are probably tracking
action items instead. Because issues are large problems, there should not
be many items open at any one time. If you find that your Issues Log is
full of action items, chances are that your true issues are hidden and not worked on as they
should.
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