Tool Mentor: Meetings and Engineering Workflow Management

Synopsis

Prepare for, conduct, and follow-up on meetings using Engineering Workflow Management.

Value

Engineering Workflow Management helps facilitate meetings by providing a means to track the status of meetings, record meeting notes, and create work items for later action.

Prepare

The person responsible for the meeting performs the following steps:

Step

Tool guidance

1. Create a work item for the meeting

If you created work items from a work item template, then a work item may already have been created.

Include in the work item the purpose of the meeting, agenda, and link to material to be reviewed in the meeting.

See Creating work items in the web client.

2. Send out invitations

The invitation should clearly indicate how those who cannot attend the meeting can provide input.

For example:

Release 2.0 Planning Meeting
[Meeting coordinates (time, place, webmeeting info]
If unable to attend, please review the Product Vision [link] and Product Backlog [link] and attach any comments you would like us to discuss in the meeting to the "Plan release 2.0" work item [link].

Conduct

Step

Tool guidance

1. Designate a presenter to share his or her screen and do updates.

Ideally the attendees are also logged into Engineering Workflow Management so that they can help log work items (such as ideas and impediments) as they arise, to offload the scribe.

2. Designate a scribe to take minutes (if minutes are desired)

Minutes can be added to the work item, or to the work product being reviewed.

On plans you can use or add a page for meeting notes. See Adding plan pages and Creating plan notes.

Retrospective type work items include a "Notes" section. If you use a Task work item, you can capture meeting notes in the "Description" section.

3. Set the state of the meeting work item to "In Progress".

Updating work items in the web client

Follow-up

After the meeting:

Step

Tool guidance

1. Create work items from notes

Create additional work items (typically some tasks, risks, and/or impediments) based on any notes taken during the meeting.

See Creating work items in the web client.
Note that the Engineering Workflow Management Eclipse client can facilitate work item extraction by highlighting the text, right click the text and select Extract Work Item.

2. Add reviewers/approvers

To ensure everyone provides feedback, consider adding absent team members as reviewers/approvers.

Reviews/approvals are covered under Triaging work items in the web client.

3. Resolve the work item

If you have a work item for the meeting, set the meeting work item to "Done" after all offline feedback is received.

Updating work items in the web client