New and Old Ways to Create Institutional Memory

Co-op and condo boards generate blizzards of reports, emails, meeting minutes, contracts, bid specifications, and other documents. A tool that can help boards see through the blizzard is a project-management platform, or PMP – an online, private website that automatically collects, organizes, and preserves co-op and condo board documents, from simple meeting minutes to large-scale capital-improvement workflow. 

Different PMPs do this in different, but similar, ways. In the popular Basecamp, for instance, you start a “to-do” list for a project, which creates an email thread. Further emails in that thread will automatically be fed into that particular project, along with any attachments. 

Who can access all this? Whoever you choose – and no one else. Consider a large capital-improvement project with numerous players. “You’d have the architect, the project manager, the board members, and the head of the [management company’s] accounting department to advise on budgeting,” says Nathan Hurley, financial analyst for New Bedford Management, which uses Basecamp. “All these different entities come together and create a master to-do list.” Tasks to check off might include “Send out requests for proposals,” “Meet to discuss bids,” “Meet finalist vendors,” “Choose vendor,” and “Commence work.” 

You can also keep selected things invisible from specific individuals. The architect, for instance, might be blocked from seeing other architects’ bid responses. “We can have internal [management-company] projects that are excluded from board view, and maybe when we complete it we give the board a summary,” says Hurley. 

The cost of PMPs is not prohibitive. Subscriptions to very basic platforms, such as eXo or Trello, start at under $10 a month, while some of the more feature-filled, including Celoxis, LiquidPlanner, and Zoho, cost $25 to $69 a month. Some plans bill per user, some have no per-user fees. Prices rise based on the number of projects you want to track and how much storage you anticipate using. Zoho, for example, has a $25-per-month plan called Express that, gives you 10 gigabytes of storage and lets an unlimited number of users track up to 20 projects. 

Such platforms may be included as part of your management fee. Even so, your board still might prefer doing things the old-fashioned way. At Tudor City in Manhattan, longtime co-op board president Greg Fricke says documents are still kept at the management company’s office. “The agent keeps us up-to-date with monthly reports,” he says. “As president, I get almost a daily report from them. If you were to go into our boardroom right now, you’ll see a stack of management reports dating to January of this year. So that’s there for reference for any board member to refresh their memories.”

When it comes to the creation of institutional memory, some boards adhere to the ancient mantra: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.