=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-161/paper-12
|storemode=property
|title=Meeting Decision Follow-up and Task Management
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-161/FORUM_11.pdf
|volume=Vol-161
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/caise/ValleK05
}}
==Meeting Decision Follow-up and Task Management==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-161/FORUM_11.pdf
63
Meeting Decision Follow-up and Task Management
Carla Valle, John Koh
RWTH Aachen – Informatik V
Ahornstr. 55 - Aachen, Germany - 52056
valle@i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de, kohcherp@alumni.nus.edu.sg
Abstract. Meeting is one of the most common places where decisions are made.
However, since there is hardly any formal documentation concerning decisions made
in meetings, it turns out to be very difficult to trace these decisions. Our work argues
that in order to improve this scenario with computer supported systems, we need first
a more holistic approach regarding the meeting cycle, composed of pre-meeting, the
meeting itself and post-meeting activities, and additionally a mean to link the daily
duties of users, which are related to the decisions made, to the outcomes of meetings.
The way we propose this support is implemented as an extension of a document man-
agement system linked to a task management mechanism.
1 Introduction
The problem of understanding and improving the decision making process,
through the use of technology, has been broadly investigated over the last decades.
An expressive number of tools was created to support the different phases of the
decision making cycle (e.g. before decisions are made, at the moment they are made).
Tools vary according to domains (e.g. financial, medical) and to technological ap-
proaches, including the so called DSS (decision support systems), EIS (executive
information system), ES (expert system), DW (datawarehouse), among others.
The CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) perspective brought also addi-
tional contributions with the use of Group Decision Support Systems. This approach
brought a different viewpoint, i.e. being more focused on the process of group deci-
sion making by removing common communication barriers, providing techniques for
structuring decision analysis, and systematically directing the pattern, timing, or con-
tent of discussion [4].
Still inside of the domain of decisions, very little has been done regarding the
process that takes place after a decision is made, also know as decision follow-up, or
post-decision consolidation [5] or enactment of decisions [1]. One simple explanation
for this fact concerns the difficulty in creating a tool, which can be applied to all
ranges of post-decision situations.
One possibility to tackle with this problem is to look only at decisions made in
meetings and how to use the natural way people communicate electronically and
execute their activities to provide follow-ups to decisions made. Some of our previous
work dealt with this problem through the use of workflow management systems [3]
and through the content analysis of emails [6]. This paper focuses on a different ap-
Proceedings of the CAiSE'05 Forum - O. Belo, J. Eder, J. Falcão e Cunha, O. Pastor (Eds.)
© Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal 2005 - ISBN 972-752-078-2
64 Carla Valle, John Koh
proach that is based on the idea of creating follow-up to decisions based on the tasks
related to them.
2 Problem definition
Decision meetings are not isolated events. They are part of a continuous cycle of
premeeting, meeting and post-meeting activities [3]. The meeting itself is considered
to be the most important part of this cycle, but the other components are complemen-
tary. Making premeeting and post-meeting activities explicit may be the first step to
enhance the whole cycle and thus, to obtain better decisions as a final result. The
three phases can be considered equally important, since they deal with different as-
pects of a decision. Nevertheless, only few tools have being proposed to support pre-
meetings and post-meeting phases. Besides that, one needs to record or analyse the
activities realized by decision implementers after a meeting is finished, in order to
obtain decision follow-up. The second big problem we observe, then, is the lack of
traceability of activities related to decisions in an automatic way. Creating a new tool
only for providing such support would probably not compensate for the users efforts.
Through informal observations in various projects, we could notice that meeting
minutes often contain outcomes in the form of decisions and assigned tasks - how-
ever, there is no linkage between an assigned task and the actual fulfillment of the
task. Moreover, sometimes the information is “there” (i.e. in the minutes), but in a
much unstructured way, difficult to be analyzed by any automated mechanism. An
initial attempt at post meeting support can be a report which allows meeting outcomes
to be displayed, as well as a means for the actor involved to update the status of the
task. Such an implementation provides the users with the ability to track each task to
its current status, and provides accountability and closure to assigned tasks.
3 Proposed solution
Our decision follow-up mechanism is related to post-meeting activities; however
our proposal encompasses support for the three meeting phases, since we believe they
are interconnected. In the pre-meeting phase users can define, collaboratively, the
organization of a meeting and the topics to be inserted in the agenda. During the
meeting our system supports the elaboration of meeting minutes and its dissemination
to the attendees and related people. And for the post-meeting time, our system con-
siders collaborative review of items defined in meeting minutes, and task manage-
ment support.
The agenda module is following a classical approach of defining organizational
data regarding the meeting, like location, automatic invitations and notifications, and
the definition of issues to be discussed during the meeting. Invited people can start
collaborating, inserting or changing issues to be discussed in a collaborative way.
Then, during the meeting, a person responsible to take notes (scribe) will list each
“issue” discussed in a meeting, one or more “decisions” that are associated to it, and
65
for each “decision” one or more “tasks” that are associated it, defining a high level of
granularity (short description, responsible, deadline). Thus, the set of tasks related to
a specific decision is defined during the meetings’ dynamics or in a review process
that takes place after the meeting. Tasks, in our context, are assignments, logics unit
of work, or simply atomic processes.
Finally, during the post-meeting activities, the system is supporting users in re-
viewing the minutes, adding missing points, changing details that affect the imple-
mentation of task, negotiating further practical consequences. The review of meetings
is similar to the review of agenda items. Users can review issues, decisions, and
mainly tasks, but any change is recorded so that the historical data is not lost and
elements can be easily traced.
Figure 1: Meeting minutes example, with decisions and task defined.
66 Carla Valle, John Koh
3.1 Decision Follow-up Mechanism
The link between decisions and tasks is made during the meeting minutes docu-
mentation process and keeps on going during the execution and change of each task
status by each assigned user. The tasks can have their status changed between:
started, accepted, declined, cancelled, postponed, reproposed, completed and with-
drawed.
Each change on a task can represent a follow-up for a decision, if the task is
hooked to a decision. Since the system also allows for creating personal tasks without
being related to any decision.
At any moment, a user with the adequate access rights (e.g. a project manager or
the task involved people) is able to request a decision follow-up report from the sys-
tem, which provides a summarized view of what has occurred since the decision was
made, how the tasks evolved till then. The user receives a simple summary, with the
most recent status of each task, but has the possibility of checking all the details of
tasks evolutions. We realize that through versioning tasks changes.
The system is implemented as an extension of the document management system
BSCW [2] and includes two main modules:
x Meeting support package: with agenda, meeting minutes, notification
support. This module communicates with the Task Management module in or-
der to make the link between decisions and tasks feasible.
x Task Management package: contains all basic task management features,
plus the possibility to be automatically linked to meeting outcomes.
Both are implemented in Python, just following the BSCW standard.
4 Conclusions
One of the most interesting aspects of this proposal is to use the opportunities of
daily activities of task management, common to many users, in order to provide a
follow-up for decisions, not creating an extra tool or an extra effort from the user’s
perspective.
Although we did not execute any formal evaluation until this moment, 8 interviews
(4 professors and 4 project managers) were done in the early phases of the project in
order to validate the ideas here described.
We are currently working at implementation improvements on the BSCW package
and user interface, and we aim at realizing formal evaluations in April.
We are sure that this proposal will not be the solution for all problems concerning
decision follow-up, but we expect that it brings some contribution to this problem.
We are aware we are not dealing with a solution for all problems, and we can already
predict some of them. For instance, the restrictions of using BSCW for supporting
meeting activities, since this system is based on asynchronous interaction. In order to
deal with this restriction, in particular, we plan to develop some modules to allow for
offline work (e.g. agenda and minutes elaboration offline) with late upload to the
document management system, where the system will parse automatically the content
of the offline created document, creating the corresponding elements (e.g. issue,
67
decision, tasks), assigning tasks to the right users and notifying users of the system
changes. This will be realized using a simple document following a structured form.
References
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Special issue on Novel Applications of the WWW, Spring 1997, Academic Press, Cam-
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