Hello everyone.
just a kind of survey as to know how you use activities and action items.
As you know, you can create as many action items as you want in a project, the project plan does not progress as the action items are resolved. You can create action items associated to directly to document (CAD or non CAD) to meetings, to activities.
From a project plan perspective, it may look as if an activity is like an action item. There is an assignee who must do something.
I read in some of PTC documentation the following
- Action items are used to capture project issues that must be resolved or items that must be accomplished, and are not formally tracked in a project plan. Action items are useful for identifying and tracking supporting work that must be accomplished either prior to, or as part of a formal project activity.
- Activities are specific steps in the project that contain information such as duration and effort. Activities have a completion date that can be associated to a deliverable.
All the above seems quite straightfoward and I guess everyone uses them more or less as described above. However how do you manage the communication between an activity owner and the resources ?
The way we currently do it is the following.
The project manager creates an activity and assign an owner and also the resources the owner is allowed to use. (We only manage human resources at the moment in PJL). In the event the owner is not the only resource, the owner will then create action items to tell each resource what to do. The owner will then regularly check the progress of the action items and accordingly update the activity status.
Sometimes, it is a shame that the activity status cannot be automatically updated from the statuses of the action items. On the other hand, the owner may still want/need to do certain things which are not capture by an action item but has an impact on the activity status.
How do you manage the "link" between activity owner and resources?
How do you task the resources?
Do you have any practices you would like to share with the community ?
PS: Based on Windchill 9.1
