Collaborating with the Project Diary/Document List

You can add diary entries and documents to any project in the system by using the Collaboration menu on the project's dashboard. These items give your team a running commentary on a project's progress as well as a central repository for documents associated with the project.

If your firm uses Microsoft Outlook, then you can use BigTime's Outlook Toolbar to populate the project diary with emails, tasks or calendar items in Outlook. Users just need to download and install the toolbar! They can also use it to add those same items to the project document list. They can even add email attachments to the project document list.

We cover BigTime's document management capabilities in another section of the System Guide, but consider a couple of the ways other firms use these collaboration tools to help project teams stay on top of each and every project.

1. Project Managers can create a weekly diary entry. That entry can be used to summarize progress on a project (or developments in an account team) and is an excellent tool for management review or to get a new team member up to speed.
2. EMail threads can be added to the diary. Those threads can help document/track the discussion(s) that led to important decisions as projects move through their lifecycle.
3. Digests can be added to the diary for each phase or sub-team on a project. While most projects have a set of "documents" that outline scope, schedules and deliverables; there are often details that go un-documented as a project team works to translate those high-level needs in practice. The diary provides an un-official repository for your various team members to post important "practical" guidelines as each project progresses.
4. The Document List can track versions of important project documents. Each document is checked in/out of the system and a history of edits for each document is stored on your BigTime server.
5. Estimate/Invoice versions can also be stored as PDF documents. You may use BigTime to produce several versions of these documents, and you may decide to store them as "documents" in the collaboration section of the dashboard so that you can refer to them as the project progresses.