BIM 360 Meetings, Part 2: Meeting Minutes

In our previous “BIM 360 Meetings” blog post, we went over how to create an agenda for an upcoming or recurring meeting in BIM 360. In this follow-up article, we’ll cover how to fill out meeting minutes and document everything pertinent from the meeting. Meeting minutes are an important legal record of project progress, so the more organized and thorough the proceedings are documented the better.

Open the meeting

Open BIM 360 Project Management (1) and navigate to Meetings. From there, if you have a ton of meetings to choose from, you can filter them by date or date range using the calendar to the left. On the other hand, if you know the date and time that your meeting is supposed to take place, you can select it (3) in the center.

Often, you’ll want to find last week’s meeting and click (4) the “Follow-up” button. This will take last week’s meeting minutes and create a new meeting from them.

There are a couple of things that are great about this feature. First, you don’t have to painstakingly create a new meeting. Second, you don’t have to reference the old meeting and re-report everything that happened in the previous meeting – just click that follow-up button and all of the open items from the previous meeting will be populated into your new follow-up meeting.

You could, of course, simply choose to create a new meeting by clicking the blue button in the top right corner.

Modifying and recording meeting minutes

Once you find and open your meeting, filling out your meeting minutes is pretty straightforward.

To modify or add information to an existing discussion item, just click on (5) it and start typing. If you want to add an item, just roll over toward the bottom of the topic and (6) click the blue plus button.

Notice that when you click the button, it allows you to do a few things. You can move your item if it needs to be relocated by clicking on the “6-dots” icon. You can schedule a due date, assign responsible party members or even add attachments from BIM 360 or your desktop. You’ll see in my example below that I assigned Item 6 to Mark, and it’s due on Thursday.

From there, once you fill out or add any new items, you can also close out old ones by (7) clicking the status drop-down and changing the item from Open to Closed. You’ll only want to do this for items that were resolved since the last meeting. You’ll want to keep open the items that you will need to follow up on next week.

Once the meeting is finished, simply click (8) Mark as minutes at the top. This will set the meeting minutes as record. Don’t worry if you left something out or clicked this in error; you can always revert back at any time to clarify or improve your minutes. From there, you can (9) distribute the minutes by exporting them as a PDF or set up a follow-up meeting. If more members need to be notified, then you can always add them to your invitees and distribution list.

Meetings simplified

Next time you’re in a project meeting and juggling multiple documents or pieces of paper trying to stay organized, remember what’s great about BIM 360 Meeting Minutes:

• Easily document your meeting.
• Follow up the next week.
• Set up next week’s meeting agenda.
• Assign tasks to your team members.
• Manage everything through BIM 360.

Assigning tasks is both a great visualization tool and also helpful for follow-up later on. There’s never a question about whose responsibility an item was, because it’s documented clearly. It’s easy to assign, review and close items out, allowing them to drop off the following week.

Would you like to try out or get a demo for BIM 360 Build? Contact Applied Software today, and a BIM 360 expert will schedule a call with you to discuss your company’s individual needs.