Using Tasks and Semi-structured Messages to Support Decision Follow Up
Using Tasks and Semi-structured Messages to
Support Decision Follow Up
Carla Valle
Wolfgang Prinz, Matthias Jarke
RWTH Aachen
Fraunhofer FIT / RWTH Aachen
Aachen, Germany
Sankt Augustin / Aachen, Germany
carla.valle@pobox.com
ginenname.surname@fit.fraunhofer.de
Abstract—This paper describes the design and implementation of a
decision implementers to: (i) be reminded of things to be done coordination mechanism to support follow up of decisions made in that have impacts on decisions outcomes, (ii) answer questions meetings, using task management and semi-structured messages in on how decisions were made and why, and (iii) get in an easy an integrated way. Two questions lead our research: i) can a set of and quick view the understanding about the status of decisions
group support mechanisms, enabling the link between pre-meeting,
meeting and post-meeting activities, allow for better coordination of already made. As a consequence of this track support, project managers can possibly learn about the conventions of the decisions being implemented?; ii) can electronic elements, which decision process and thus can improve the quality of future belong to daily project scenarios, provide awareness of decision decisions.
implementation’s problems? Our evaluations and conclusions
indicate that such elements (i.e. tasks and emails) provide means Since we cannot discuss all means where people make for coordination of decision follow up. decisions, in order to define the follow up possibilities, we have
reduced the scope of this research only to decisions made in meetings. Our choice is based on the fact that meetings are one
I. I NTRODUCTION of the most common places, for project team work, where
Presently, organizational scenarios demand that employees decisions are made and, mainly, possible to be documented
exchange and obtain information from various sources to electronically. Doing so, we embraced in our research many accomplish their duties. Said in other words, there is an aspects of CSCW, in general, and specifically the aspects
increasing need for team work, for collaboration and for related to coordination and meetings. coordination. Consequently, the use of collaborative [15] and coordination technology [13], [14], is required. Good coordination is nearly invisible, and we sometimes This paper discusses one of these problems: the problem of notice coordination most clearly when it is lacking [13]. Nowadays, with the dissemination of globalized organizations
decision follow up, and how a set of integrated groupware, the role of coordination became even more important than in extended by a decision management module, can provide the past. Teams are working in geographically distributed sites, means to represent and trace decisions achieved in meetings. teams are cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary. In order to
Thus, we extended a groupware, so that it could support support this type of project team work, we still need to research meeting and decision management. Additionally, we have and make proposals on methodologies, methods and tools to integrated them with a task management module, and with a support project management itself, as well as core activities semi-structured messages module. The decisions’ follow ups like communication and exchange of information, which are all are mainly achieved through this integrated approach together part of coordination. Coordinating how decisions are
with a set of specific reports.
implemented with the support of technology, in order to
The mechanisms used nowadays to provide information provide better project outcomes, is one of the needs of a project
about decision implementation are more often based on user’s
manager.
efforts than on automatic systems’ feedbacks. Common means After analysing the relevant literature and investigating to obtain information about the status of a decision include available products, we thought that a solution to support informal face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, decision follow ups, of decisions made in meetings, would or electronic communication, like emails and instant have to encompass not only the meeting itself, but also the
messaging. However, a lot of data is constantly created by activities for preparing a meeting and, mostly, the activities users, either through documents, or through electronic after the meetings. Thus, a more holistic and integrated communication, which could be used to automatically provide approach had to be considered, involving a complete meeting some levels of follow up to decision makers and to decision cycle, which is composed of pre-meeting, meeting and post- implementers. meeting support. In all these phases, decisions are made
One aspect of this problem is how to get the right explicit and possible to be managed. information from these electronic elements to provide
improvements on decision implementation. Or more Section III details the design process and section IV presents The next section discusses related research and products. specifically, how can technology help decision makers and the prototype. Section V describes two evaluations realized and improvements on decision implementation. Or more Section III details the design process and section IV presents The next section discusses related research and products. specifically, how can technology help decision makers and the prototype. Section V describes two evaluations realized and
A more related initiative is discussed in [3]. The authors conclusions.
discuss the use of a post-meeting support workflow-like solution where working plans can be described and enacted.
ELATED W ORK II. R The proposed solution is a system combining a process design tool with a workflow enactment tool. However, given the ad- Most of the systems which deal with the concept of
hoc nature of the processes described in the paper, the authors “decision” in an explicit way were proposed by the research
suggest that a commercial Workflow Management System area of Decision Support Systems (DSS). However, the focus
(WfMS) alone would not be enough to support the of DSS has been on the decision making process support per se
requirements of the scenario of post-meeting phases. Even with and not on the phases that preceed or follow the decision
the adoption of a WfMS for process enactment, additional making process, as it is the case of our more CSCW related
monitoring tools are suggested. The system proposed is divided research.
into four modules: a process pattern library, a process model Since we were interested in supporting decision follow ups,
tool, a data driven WfMS which allows applications to access especially in the context of meetings, we have concentrated the
the process data; and a subscription mechanism to allow analysis of related work on systems that encompass the organization members to be kept informed of the decision preparation and execution of meetings, as well as system that
implementation. The main limitation of this approach is the give continuity to the time after the meeting is finished. Thus,
lack of integration with tools to support post-meeting activities, we looked for various CSCW systems considering the scope of
such as project management systems, document management meeting cycles (pre-, meeting, and post-) and the decision
systems, e-mails, to-do lists and others.
representation. LiteMinutes [7] is a system that uses both the Web and e- SISCO [2] is an asynchronous support meeting preparation
mail for creating, revising, distributing, and accessing (ASMP) tool, which aims at assisting the preparation for a
multimedia information captured in a meeting. Supported decision making meeting. The basis of SISCO includes media include text notes taken on laptops, slide images improvements on communication among meeting participants
captured from presentations, and video recorded by cameras in and organizers, but also support for group interfaces, group
the room. The main objective of this project was to improve a memory, and group communication. The authors state that in
traditional problem of catching everything in a meeting. Based most cases decisions are too complex to be made over an
on the capture of these multimedia data, “lite minutes” are asynchronous distributed system and thus, they assume that
generated and put available for related meeting participants and they will be made during the meeting itself. The SISCO system
observers.
divides the pre-meeting phase into four groups of activities: Meeting Central [25] is focused on improving the preparation, setting-up, development and closing-up. The effectiveness of distributed meetings, meaning different people
discussion model adopted by SISCO is an extension of the in different locations using various forms of communication. IBIS argumentation model. It has the same basic elements:
For supporting the distributed scenario, a set of tool was issue, position and argument but includes remark and task.
developed: a console—for the basic organization, a Logan is a Web Electronic Meeting Document Manager
facilitator—an application that provides awareness about (WEMDM) which provides a web-based automated process for
participants online, a PDF viewer—for sharing collaborative asynchronous, collaborative development of a textual meeting
documents, and a shared desktop—for sharing web pages. agenda [20] Logan supports asynchronous, distributed, formal
Although Meeting Central does not focus on decision and its meeting collaboration, using documents in conjunction with a
implementation, its support for the meetings realized in tool for carrying out discussions. It provides analysis of distributed scenario is very interesting. meeting transcripts to generate dynamically derived documents
Besides the tools mentioned before, we observe that a “new for use in a meeting as meeting’s guide usage, helping in giving
generation” of meeting support tools is bringing up other direction and guidance to meetings.
research interests. They are based on automatic extraction of SISCO and Logan, although comprehensive in the pre-
meeting contents, once recorded as multimedia (i.e. video, meeting support, leave open the possibilities for the other two
audio).
phases of the meeting cycle. Easy Meeting [6] uses pervasive computing in meeting
A more recent approach is the Agenda Planning Technique rooms. The system makes uses of agent technology, semantic [8] which describes a built-in incentive mechanism, based on
web ontologies, logic reasoning, and security and privacy the VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves) method from game theory,
policies. A smart meeting room system is a distributed system aiming at helping project managers in the domain of that consists of communities of intelligent agents, services, engineering construction industry to create a more effective
devices, and sensors that share a common goal. The goal is to agenda for their meetings. This system shows that even after
provide relevant services and information to the meeting several years of research on meetings and related concepts,
participants (e.g., speakers, audiences, and organizers) based on there are still open problems to be solved. This reference is
their situation conditions. Some typical smart meeting room relevant because it combines game theory and CSCW applications include automatic capturing and indexing free- principles, like anonymity, in the meeting preparation phase,
hand sketches on a whiteboard, tracking location, assisting but it is limited because the support provided does not include
attendees and rescheduling. The authors emphasize the other meeting phases.
importance of the “context” in the realization of a smart importance of the “context” in the realization of a smart
documents, projects, meetings and data management. The context ontology, context reasoning and users’ related meeting management in Groove is quite comprehensive, contextual information.
allowing for: sharing documents, carrying on conversations, assigning action items, working offline, conducting virtual
Meeting Room [18] is a system that automatically allows meetings, and keeping track of schedules, tasks and milestones. individuals to browse meetings’ contents. The “meeting It can be used before meetings to organize agenda and
browser” system answers many of the questions an absent participants, during meetings to conduct and record, and after individual may ask. It records meetings, automatically meetings to track outcomes. Groove seems to be one of the
transcribes and summarizes them, and allows a user to search closest systems related to our approach, since it combines the meeting, or a set of meetings, for a particular speaker, topic features of document management systems, communication or idea. The Meeting Browser encompasses speaker support and meeting support. The lack of support for follow-
identification, automatic speech recognition, language model ups, in detailed ways (e.g. with visualizations, searches) and adaptation, dialogue analysis and automatic summarization. the lack of distinction between tasks and decisions are two This project automatically transcribes meetings and can features that are not present in Groove.
provide answers, as follows: a user may search the transcription for keywords and topics, emotion recognition provides clues as
After this analysis we could conclude that although there to the meeting's mood, summarization offers a quick overview,
are many and different approaches to the issues related to the highlighted action items provides assignments and video meeting cycles, very little has been done in making decisions playback makes the user feel as if he missed nothing.
explicitly represented in the systems, and moreover, means to obtain automatically decisions follow-ups were not found.
Multimodal Meeting Manager [17] is concerned with the construction of a demonstration system to enable structuring, browsing and querying of an archive of automatically analyzed
ESIGN III. D
meetings. The archived meetings will have taken place in a Considering that meetings are one of the most common room equipped with multimodal sensors. Their main objectives
practices where decisions are made [21], [22], [19] and that with this system are: development of a "smart" meeting room,
they often lead to the implementation of decisions, our collection and annotation of a multimodal meetings database,
approach discusses the theoretical and the technological aspects analysis and processing of the audio and video streams, robust
of a complete meeting cycle and the decision follow up related conversational speech recognition, to produce a word-level
to this scenario.
transcription, recognition of gestures and actions, a multimodal identification of intent and emotion, a multimodal person
There has been much emphasis on decision support systems identification, and source localization and tracking.
and group decision support systems focusing on improving the decision making process, but little attention has been paid to
Easy Meeting, Meeting Room and Multimodal Meeting the implementation stage that follows a decision meeting. As a Manager do not deal with decisions in an explicit way and do
consequence to this fact, decisions are often only partly not offer any support for follow up. However, they show a
implemented or not implemented at all. Often, decisions that perspective of meeting support tools less focused on the are implemented without the necessary follow up, may
process, and more concerned with the contents generated and generate outcomes different from those planned at the time of automatic extractions, which is also a relevant functionality
the decision. Besides that, cultural barriers and the lack of that still requires lots of efforts from the research communities
appropriate tools induce just informal links. As a result, to turn it into smooth features in robust systems.
important decisions are not properly or timely implemented [2]. Finally, we have also looked at another category of
Decision meetings are not isolated events. They are part of systems, already mature in the market that also offers support
a continuous cycle of pre-meeting, meeting and post-meeting to part of the scenario of meetings and decisions.
activities (Oppenheimer, cited in [4]). The meeting itself is the For example, Microsoft SharePoint [16] is a server system
most visible part of this cycle, but the other components are that provides: discussions, notifications, document always present. Making pre-meeting and post-meeting management and search capabilities. SharePoint if one of the
activities explicit may be the first step to enhance the whole few systems we have analyzed which explicitly represents
cycle and thus, to obtain better decisions as a final result. “decisions”. Decisions are created in “meeting workspaces”,
All three phases can be considered equally important, since
i.e. a special type of folder, which is dedicated to support and they deal with different aspects of a decision. However, only document meetings. Besides events’ calendar with the meeting
few tools have being proposed to support pre-meetings and date, time and description, SharePoint supports the definitions
post-meeting phases, as we discussed before. Figure 1 shows of agenda, tasks and decisions. The problem of SharePoint,
how the three phases are interrelated and our viewpoint of though, is the lack of relation between tasks and decisions and
seeing decisions as an element that is part of the complete no possibilities of direct view on follow-ups. Decisions are
cycle.
mere text fields, connected only to the meetings where they were documented.
Groove is another system that follows in the same category as SharePoint, it allows teams to work together over a network
1. Pre-meeting 1. Pre-meeting
2. Meeting 2. Meeting
and will likely remain the dominant collaboration tool for the
Agenda, Agenda,
Minutes, Minutes,
foreseeable future. The email or groupware “inbox” is where
pending issues, pending issues,
decisions, tasks, decisions, tasks,
new decisions new decisions
responsibilities responsibilities
most of the collaborative communications, contacts, and other content are located. Any collaborative tool that is looking to build a customer base, even if someday it will surpass email in
Decision Decision
usage, will need to start by acting as an extension to email.
In the scenario of decision follow-ups emails are already
3. Post-meeting 3. Post-meeting
Tasks’ executions, Tasks’ executions, conversations, conversations,
being used. Many users rely on emails to get up to date
new decisions new decisions
information about projects, tasks, responsibilities and track of on going processes. In [10] we see an example of study that
tried to understand how users organize their emails and the
Figure 1. Meeting cycle
information contained in them, like to-dos, calendar events, to- reads, etc. Email has great advantages over other tools. It is
The pre-meeting phase involves the organization of a simple, not costly (except the storage costs, which are meeting: the creation of an agenda, the identification of people
becoming very high), it is already accepted as a communication to be invited, the negotiations about who should participate in
tool in many organizations and it supports asynchronous the meeting and their roles, the preparation of each participant
communication. On the other hand, e-mails are not easily for the meeting, the inclusion of background information, the
structured. Some available tools provide basic mechanisms to discovery of material to support new proposals, the organize them in folders, sub-groups, by sender/receiver,
identification of new decisions to be made, and the review of incoming and outcoming messages, but the context of the pending ones.
messages and even their content are not analyzed by these Meetings can be of different types, categorized by size,
mechanisms. Thus, if the user writes a “reply” to another user, frequency of occurrence, composition, motivation, and decision
using an old email as a basis, but writes about a totally different process used [11]. During the meeting phase, where normally
subject, these structure mechanisms will not recognize the decisions are made, other demands appear, different from the
difference (new reference)
previous phase. For example, the recovery of historical data Since it is through communication channels that people related to the present problems, the recovery of lessons-learned
exchange knowledge and opinion, raise problems and solve to help improve the decisions to be made, the definition of who
them, and since e-mail is one the most common electronic is going to be responsible for each task; these interactions
element used for such, we chose to use them as one of the among participants may conclude with one or more decisions
means to provide decision follow ups.
to be implemented afterwards. Another concept which is relevant to our research is the The post-meeting phase is when the implementation of the
concept of “task”. Task can be defined as a mission, an decisions is executed. This stage contains activities to be
assignment, and obligation, a logic unit of work, a process that carried out by people not necessarily present in the meetings.
cannot be subdivided any further, i.e. an atomic process. The Its activities include dissemination, monitoring implementation
difference between a process and a task is: a process is of the decisions and clarification of ambiguous decision details.
constructed from tasks and conditions or order of tasks. Tasks In this phase new demands occur, for e.g. the use of past
affect all levels of an organization (operational, managerial, successful steps and lessons-learned about past mistakes. and strategic), they are related to “deadlines”, production,
However, we believe that this phase also involves knowledge decisions, projects, implementation, finalization of activities, that can be useful in future instances of the cycle. Experiences
reports, etc. Working in groups is a reality, therefore we need of the implementation phase can provide indicators for new
to coordinate people‘s work and most of this work is organized meetings, and stories about what was implemented with or
in tasks.
without success as discussed in [23]. And last, but not least, new decisions may appear during this phase. These decisions
The link between decisions and tasks should start during the may or may not be related to other decisions made, but they
meeting minutes documentation process and keep on going should be observed and checked as those related to meetings.
during the execution and change of each task status by each assigned user. Tasks, also called, actions, contain the most
One of our challenges when defining how we could support relevant information regarding the steps for the post-meeting this cycle and decision follow up, was the choice of elements
activities, i.e. what needs to be done. Our main goal behind this which we thought to be relevant for such scenario. Besides the
discussion is to show that meeting support tools, linked with meeting cycle itself, we chose to look at two other elements,
task management tools, and together with emails, can enable which are very common in diverse scenarios: e-mails and tasks.
users to lookup at the results of tasks and exchange of related e- We based our choice on previous research done related to these
mails and get a better view of the follow-up of decisions made two elements.
in meetings. At any moment, a decision maker or a decision E-mail is the one of most successful computer supported
responsible should be able to request a decision follow-up and communication tool available nowadays, specifically oriented
the system should provide a summarized view, based on the to asynchronous situations. E-mails are electronic tasks and emails related to that decision. communication tools, with a stable utilization across
One of the most interesting aspects of this integration is to organizations [12]. The authors suggest that e-mail is currently
use the opportunities of daily activities (i.e. tasks and emails), use the opportunities of daily activities (i.e. tasks and emails),
and we aim at analysing how communication (i.e. emails) perspective.
impacts it.
A. Requirements and barriers The following list shows the relationship of coordination At the beginning of our research we realized a set of 6 in-
elements from [13], in italic, and how they were used in our depth interviews with project managers of information design: technology related projects aiming at validating our first ideas, which were motivated through observation, and, at the same
• Managing shared resources, through the allocation of time, identifying requirements for the supporting tools. As
actors’ time to the tasks to perform, and through decision outcome of these interviews an extensive and comprehensive
and task tracking
list of requirements was created. However, we had to select • Managing producer/consumer relationships, through part of them, in order to make the implementation feasible for a
standardization, notification and tracking first version. Nevertheless, we tried to make a selection which
• Managing simultaneity constraints, through scheduling still respected a degree of completeness to verify the ideas
and synchronization
proposed in our research. For example, one requirement we • Managing task/subtask relationship, through Task could not consider in this first version concerns the
decomposition and negotiation
management and automatic recognition of multimedia information. Some of the requirements used in our • Group-decision making, through alternatives, task decomposition and tracking implementation are the following:
• Communication, through the integrated use of e-mails, • R1: Decisions made should be explicitly represented
standards for communication and means to create • R2: Users should be able to classify critical decision and
common knowledge
critical impacts From the LAP, we used the concept of “conversation”, • R3: It should provide information about responsibility proposed in [24], because we wanted to analyse how • R4: Decision’s responsibility should be associated to one asynchronous communication in the context of a project, where
person, or to a group of people decisions are being implemented, influence the course of the • R5: It should allow for attaching a document to a decision implementation. Some steps taken during project development • R6: It should provide template for meeting minutes can be seen as “speech-acts” when they influence and change
the status of decisions, issues, tasks, agendas and minutes, • R7: It should provide a formalization of meeting according to the LAP approach. Especially in distributed outcomes
projects, the scenario we consider the most appropriate to • R8: It should provide means to relate meeting outcomes to
justify our proposal, conversations takes place in various electronic communication related to decisions made
moments, and they normally involve groups of people. • R9: It cannot be too structured
Conversations, in our model, are collections of related • R10: It should provide flexibility on receiving or messages, which are linked by their content. Messages, in our
visualizing information about decision follow up (e.g. a model, contain a semi-structure which refers to the web-page with an overall view)
coordination elements. For example, a message can explicitly • R11: It should be connected to “to-do” lists refer to a decision or to a task. Through the exchange of semi- • R12: It should avoid follow up via email, since there is structured messages, which are integrated to the coordination
model of the meeting cycle, with decisions and tasks, already an overload of emails
conversations for action and conversations for clarification are • R13: It should make use of graphical elements, like icons
documented.
representing concepts and status • R14: It should provide reports via email if wished Following the principles of LAP, we identified two types of
• R15: It should provide "summaries" with what is doing conversation to be integrated in our proposal: well, or still open, and things done
Conversation for action, used, in the contexts of: • R16: The system must not be an extra tool only to provide
requesting collaboration, requesting task executions, decision follow ups, but mechanisms that run, either with
negotiating (i.e. in the task management, and in the meeting few or no interference of users, which are linked to
organization), and follow up reports (see next sections), in communication tools users already make use of
order to solve a problem identified during decision implementation.
Thus, the lists of requirements helped us define the scope of the solution.
Conversation for clarification, used in the contexts of: clarifying topics related to decision implementation, and task
B. Coordination theory and language action perspective execution, providing opinions, arguments and contra- Our conceptual model contains aspects of two theories: the
arguments, and informing project participants about something Coordination Theory [15], [16] and the Language Action of the group’s interest, like sharing information.
Perspective (LAP) [24]. Both were discussed and integrated in the implementation and used as a basis for the evaluation
C. Components
analysis. These choices were made considering that our Our design model is composed of four different requirements deals with concepts of coordination (e.g. the
coordination elements, which are related to each other:
The project repository is the component that includes all the The concept of decision is one of the most important in this others. For example, the different meetings cycles, the research. Different from the initiatives discussed before, we traceability of decisions, the management of tasks and the
aim at making decisions explicitly represented and stored in reports used for traceability, all of them, take place in the
our system. Decision is a report of a conclusion, and in our context of a project. A “project” is the metaphor used for
case, it can represent the conclusion of a group. Project organizing all the coordinated elements, including decisions.
decisions are all decisions made, which may have tasks associated to them or not. A decision can be created, and exist
The meeting coordination component deals with two phases independently of any project element (except the project itself), of the meeting cycle: (i) the pre-meeting—represented through or be part of meetings, either in agendas, or in minutes. After a the meeting agendas; (ii) the meeting itself—represented decision is created, tasks and conversations can be associated to
through the meeting minutes. Agendas provide the basis for it. According to the task management results, or to the minutes. And additionally, agendas and minutes items can be influence that conversations have on it, follow ups are originated from three different sources: (a) the outside world, provided. The trace of a decision will then contain information representing new items, i.e. topics that are entering the project on how decisions evolve, following the natural evolution of the context for the first time, (b) from previous meetings tasks and conversations.
documentation, i.e. allowing links between different meetings and (c) from the project repository element, i.e. issues,
A decision has its own life cycle as indicated in Figure 2: decisions, tasks and conversations, which are the basis for the
open – represents the time when a decision is created; inactive decision follow-up idea. This flexibility allows for links and active – represents the time when tasks are added to a between all these elements, which are normally done decision; suspended – represents the situation when a decision informally when project people are organizing meetings is postponed for a while; closed – when no actions are required; without using an approach like the one proposed in this cancelled – when a decision is cancelled, completed – when a research.
decision is accomplished and archived – represents status of historical data.
The other elements of coordination represent the concepts of issues, decisions, tasks and conversations. Issues represent
A decision may represent the statement of one individual the highest concept, which can be related to several decisions.
(e.g. from the project manager) or the consensus of a group of
A decision can be, or not, related to an issue, and can have people. In this research, we do not support the phase when a several tasks associated to it. A task is dependent on a decision
decision consensus is made, i.e. the decision making activities and can have a project representation as well as a personal task
themselves. Our automated support starts at the moment an representation. These three elements together form the core
individual or a group have come up to a conclusion about a concepts that provide the means for decision follow-ups. Each
topic, made a decision and will document it. Our support also feedback given to any task, at the personal level, automatically
allows for storing decisions to be made in the project context, updates the associated project task, in a cascade effect, giving
but once more, no support for simulations, brainstorming, the basis for a decision follow-up. The same idea is applied for
voting, or similar mechanisms are part of our scope.
a conversation. Conversations can refer to any of these elements at the project level. The task feedback and the
A decision has a name, a description, responsible part (one conversations are part of the post-meeting phase in the meeting
or many), a start and an expiration date, and may have tasks, cycle.
documents and conversations associated to it. Milestones or critical points are also associated to a decision, in order to
The coordination traceability element represents the facilitate the coordination and the review processes. Besides, a possibilities of visualizing the relationships between the decision has three dimensions: complexity degree (i.e. elements discussed in 1, 2 and 3, altogether, through the use of
complex, medium, and simple), predictable implementation text and graphic reports. The idea here is to obtain, in an
(i.e. yes, or no), and a decision type (i.e. new, provocative, automatic view, the understanding of the status of a decision
recurrent, etc). Together, these attributes indicate decisions that made in a meeting. Additionally, other levels of report are
must be traced, or not. They assist the coordination to focus on included to allow for different levels of traceability in the
the most important items in the project, based on the critical context of a project.
level of implementation.
One of the innovative concepts we are proposing in this research is the explicit management of decisions made, through the task and conversation integration to decisions made in
meetings. However, all the concepts discussed are “only” the basis to first document decisions, and second to enable follow
ups of decisions made. The main goal, though, is to reach a better understanding of the decisions under implementation.
For this specific goal, we suggest the use of various reports which support the users of our system to trace decisions and
tasks.
This concept was influenced by some aspects from the area of “requirements traceability”, from Software Engineering.
Figure 2. Decision state diagram
Requirements traceability is defined as the ability to describe Requirements traceability is defined as the ability to describe
semi-structured emails, sent from the e-mail client extended with our reports was a mean to trace “decisions”, “tasks” and
with our functions, to the other coordination elements (e.g. “conversations” associated to them, enabling cross referencing
decisions, tasks repositories) – Figure 4.
links, and structuring the meeting process in order to obtain a network of related elements.
The report module communicates with all the others in order to provide the traceability mechanisms.
IV. T HE COORDE PROTOTYPE In the e-mail client, the mechanisms to send semi-structured The COORDE prototype is composed of an extension of a
messages were implemented through two features. The first is a document management system [1], [5] implemented as a profile form for each document management server the user “package”, and an extension of Microsoft Outlook as the e-
wants to send contextualized messages, and the second as an mail client [16]. The Coordination Package is composed of a
extension of the basic toolbar to send e-mails. set of modules: issue, decision, task, and meeting management modules. Additionally, the reports were implemented with Java
Inside the document management system, the structure of Applets, to enable better interactivity and data visualization.
the coordination elements was implemented following the general concept of folder. Thus, there is a project folder, with
The mapping between the conceptual model and the all other elements under its hierarchy. In order to distinguish implementation modules works as follows:
our special coordination folders from the standard ones, we have implemented awareness mechanisms, using different
Projects, in the conceptual model, are implemented as the
icons and visualization pages.
highest element in the coordination hierarchy (i.e. the Coordination folder) – Figure 3.
V. E VALUATION
Inside of projects there are four basic modules, the issues, The evaluation of COORDE was done in two parts: a decisions, tasks and meeting modules, where the respective
partial evaluation, and a complete evaluation. These activities elements are managed.
were different, and had complementary goals. The two evaluations were summative, in the sense that they were used
The user management module follows the principles of the to evaluate “how” the prototype was adequate to the working standard document management system, but implements the practices. The first activity has focused on the meeting cycle different roles required in our conceptual model (e.g. the task and on task management; the second activity considered the requester, task performer, decision maker, etc.). integrated approach, and some improvements based on the
results from the second evaluation.
The activities combined different research methods: scenarios (from the area of software engineering and usability)
combined with intensive interviews, and expert walkthroughs (from the usability area).
Before describing our activities, we would like to emphasize a key aspect of our evaluation: the target public used. The target user group of our system is mainly composed of project coordinators, or project managers, although other people could be directly or indirectly influenced by the system as well. The reason why we want to stress this information at
Figure 3. A Project and its elements for coordination
this point is to explain our choices during the evaluation phases regarding whom we have interviewed and whom we have
The task management module implements the project and invited to our expert walkthroughs. Since we could not afford personal tasks, as well as the negotiation mechanisms.
to execute evaluations with all possible users, we focused our evaluation on the opinions, and critics of the experts, i.e. project members with the responsibility of coordinating and managing, who could better understand if the balance between our proposal and the daily practice would be adequate or far, and if the benefits were enough to justify more structure and coordination as it is proposed in our solution.
A. First evaluation The first evaluation took place in April 2005 and two methods were used: scenario and intensive interviews. Seven
people took part in this phase, five men and two women. All interviewees had some experience in distributed projects, and
Figure 4. Semi-structured message with tags referring to decisions and tasks
some had managed project themselves. The focus of this evaluation was on the meeting cycle support and on its relationship with the task management mechanism. The main some had managed project themselves. The focus of this evaluation was on the meeting cycle support and on its relationship with the task management mechanism. The main
concentrate on the role of project coordinators, or managers, implementation. Each interview was individually realized. The
but they could also make comments regarding any other role in duration of each of them was of approximately 1 hour and a
a project development. Each section was realized with three half.
individuals and a moderator and took approximately 2 hours and a half each.
The system was evaluated as “good” (in a scale of 5 levels, “good” being the second highest evaluation value) by all
The focus of this evaluation was the integrated approach, interviewees, and confirmed that the idea of support the but also specific concepts used in the implementation, as well meeting cycle was achieved. Additionally, the participants have
as the usability of the system. We used as a reference the ISO indicated that the coordination proposed could help the 9241-11, Part 11, Guidance on Usability, which indicates management of activities, but also the documentation of the
Efficiency, Efficacy and Satisfaction as the main usability goals process, in a “natural” way, since the use of the elements
to consider while evaluating a system.
implemented in COORDE (e.g., agenda, minutes, issue, decision, tasks) are easily understood by the users.
This evaluation focused on two usability aspects: effectiveness (representing efficacy) and satisfaction. The Some of their concerns referred to the forms’ structure used
aspect of efficiency was commented, but since the experts did in the system. Ideally less structured forms would bring more
not try out the system themselves, this aspect was not explicitly flexibility for the usage of the system. Another important
evaluated.
comment was concerned the scalability of the tool. Although they all understood the idea of task management linked to
The effectiveness of the “coordination folder” was rated meeting minutes, the management of tasks was indicated as
between good and normal. The suitability for the task was critical, if the number of tasks would increase too much.
evaluated as good, in most cases, but experts pointed out some details missing, like the representation for sub-structures as part
The idea of having agenda and minutes shared in a central of the concepts. The completeness was considered good, place was very well evaluated. They all saw advantages in
except for a date to show the end of the project and a working in this way. All participants suggested that the tool
distinction between active projects and finalized projects. would require some training, since it deals with the complexity of managing projects, but that was not seen as a negative
Regarding the “issue, decisions and tasks’ folders” the feature. The learnability curve would compensate for the experts rated the effectiveness as good, since these concepts coordination and documentation benefits. The concepts were
showed the possibility of managing elements in a clearer way clear, but would require some cognitive adaptation.
when compared to the free use of documents, which are difficult to parse and broadly used in projects.
They also commented that the new way of working could facilitate and lead the working such that agendas and minutes
Experts missed more awareness about the different status of would be naturally more organized and easy to understand.
issues, decisions and tasks and their responsible parts. For Another relevant critic was regarding the easiness of the them, the folder concept was fine, but inside of it there should agenda and minutes. Some times users complained of having
be more options for reorganization according to the users’ too much text as metadata, making it difficult to distinguish the
need. They also observed that these folders could easily be the most important items from those of less importance. More
basis for extended functionality on statistics, which might be highlights were suggested as a possible improvement.
interesting in certain phases of a project, for example in quality control.
B. Second evaluation The second evaluation took place in June 2005 in the form
The idea of having the relationship between project task of expert walkthroughs. By that time, the system had some
lists and personal tasks lists was considered very useful, and small user interface changes, which were based on the well done, since they at the same time allow for the general outcomes of the first evaluation and two new features: the
view of a project and an individual view. An important critic was done regarding tasks’ assignments. They commented that
integration with emails and graphic reports. in some distributed projects, tasks are assigned to organizations Six project managers and usability experts were invited to
and not to one individual. Normally, they are assigned to the take part of the two sections, three in each. The sections were
representatives of an organization, who takes part in the face- organized in three parts: (i) an introductory part to provide
to-face meetings and who later delegates the tasks, or the sub- context about the research and evaluation objectives, (ii) the
tasks to her own personnel.
presentation of a scenario of use, used as a guideline during the Regarding the elements meeting folder, agenda and meeting walkthrough, and (iii) the system demo showing how the
support of each part of the scenario would take place. This last minutes, experts pointed out the aspect of efficiency. In their part was sub-divided in six other parts, and between each part a
opinion, efficiency in the management of these elements is set of questions concerning a cluster of features was discussed.
more critical than in other elements. Regarding the Four men and two women took part of the activities. Four of
effectiveness, the idea of having these three distinct concepts of them had managed, or were managing distributed projects and
meeting folder, agenda and minutes was positively evaluated as two had more than five years of experience in the same type of
good. From the satisfaction perspective, most of the experts evaluated the mechanisms as good.
project, but not as project managers. All had experience of projects, which used some type of technology to support
All agreed that the idea of having a centralized repository to to daily project scenarios, provide awareness of decision share this sort of information would bring benefits for the
implementation’s problems?
management and organization of projects, and for the understanding of people who was not involved in all activities,
The answers to these questions have many perspectives to who then would access the information at any time. This was
be analyzed. What we have learned with our prototype and its considered a big advantage over the methods used by most of
evaluations shows that some aspects related to the first question them of sharing information via email (the majority) or are valid (i.e. meeting cycle, decisions explicitly represented in uploading documents to project and document management
the cycle, decision tracking, and consequent better systems. Another positively classified aspect was the life-
coordination).
cycles of agendas and minutes. This feature also made evident First, the set of mechanisms supporting the complete the collaborative process.
meeting-cycle was seen as an innovation from the CSCW and
The core functionality highly valued was the explicit coordination perspective. The automation of the complete cycle representation of decision, its association to tasks, with the
shows a possibility to improve the coordination in a rather consequence that tasks, after the minutes being published, are
“natural” way, since the concepts that are part of our prototype sent to the personal task lists. This feature, according to the
are common in many project management scenarios. The new experts shows an extreme advantage when compared to the
façade of this support, though, is the discipline or change normal documents used to represent minutes in many projects,
required in the work conditions. Users would have first to agree where decisions traceability is very difficult to be realized.
to use the system in a group setting and second, to adapt part of Another highly valued feature was the possibility of reusing
their way of realizing certain activities (e.g. writing an agenda, items from previous agendas, minutes and mainly, from the
or sending a semi-structured message) to our proposed way. repositories of issues, decisions and tasks. This feature was
The concept of having a decision representation is also easily perceived as one of the main possibilities to allow for
innovative, but the most innovative part of it is the integration continuous management.
of this representation to daily activities that project members execute, i.e. agenda, minutes, tasks and emails. The traceability
The integration of messages was highly evaluated, mostly activities proved to be a very good mean for coordination. as very good, with a few exceptions which were specific to the
Mainly through the reports, we could observe that this concept usage of the e-mail client. All experts recognized the ease of