Institutional Memory Moves Into the Cloud

Most co-op and condo boards generate blizzards of reports, emails, meeting minutes, contracts, bid specifications, and other documents. Over the years, these might get lost in a box, a file cabinet, or on a former secretary’s computer drive. They might even get left with the old management company during a bumpy transition. 

Something that can help sort out this mess is a project-management platform, or PMP. That’s 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. Some of PMP’s technological cousins include Dropbox and Google Docs, for sharing documents online; MeetOMatic and Doodle, for scheduling meetings; and BuildingLink, for notifying residents. 

Project-management platforms do two things: they track projects that have a defined beginning and end, such as a roof replacement, lobby renovation, or facade repair; and they document open-ended endeavors, such as a board’s ongoing accumulation of minutes, meeting dates, attendance records, and policy decisions. 

“They secure the institutional knowledge of co-op and condo buildings,” says Julie Zuraw, chief operating officer of Argo Real Estate, which uses a customized version of the platform Workfront called ArgoHQ. “A manager puts in every ongoing project, including things like apartment alterations, and they’re tracked with all the corresponding emails and documents in one place. If there are changes in management or board members over time, there’s one place where the history of these projects is kept.” 

Before project-management platforms became widespread, Amanda DeHaarte, an Argo property manager, would create a spreadsheet using Excel or a similar program, and then update it by hand. Because it wasn’t cloud-based – meaning the spreadsheet existed only on her computer rather than on a centralized remote computer that various parties could access online – only she could readily view and update it. And if she left the office, she couldn’t update it unless she carted her computer with her. 

With cloud-based PMPs, however, a building manager, board member, or other approved person goes to a password-protected online “project,” basically a combination action list and pumped-up workflow chart. “I click a button, a little box opens up, and I can choose in it which project or task I want to update,” DeHaarte says, describing ArgoHQ but also the general way most of these platforms work. “Once I do that, I just click ‘Update’ and it creates a separate line under that project or task.” 

The person doing the updating can manually enter an update or – and this is the real gem of such software – the system automatically uploads a related document or email. Different platforms do this in different ways, but the result is the same: the board’s institutional memory is in one place, forever, and it’s secure.