Do you spend hours each week filing emails? And is the filing of emails key to project information management? We believe this process shouldn’t be time-consuming and definitely shouldn’t be difficult.
However, the filing of emails is just the start. It is the retrieval of information that is the trickier task. And that is where filing emails by project is essential, so you can keep all project emails (with attachments) in one centralised, searchable location.
Filing by project
Why file by project? It’s a question we regularly hear. But the answer is a simple one. Decisions get made over email, by multiple people, for the duration of a project. And these emails might have to be relied upon in the future. That's why good email management is a game-changer. Filing by project means you can go on to any given project and see all the decisions that got made with ease.
On the flip side, if you don’t file by project, you might be able to gather the emails you need from scattered inboxes, but it would be a nightmare. Try it now? I dare you.
Filing by project gives you visibility of not only your own emails but also those of your colleagues that you’re not involved in. It means your full project team has transparency, and in a recent discussion with a customer, we were told, ‘the context of a project lives in our inbox’.
Five reasons to file by project:
- Highly searchable project information
- Neat structuring of filing emails to their relevant projects
- Because every other piece of documentation is against the project (drawings, invoices etc.). Why not emails?
- Ability to retrieve project correspondence in under a second
- Greater accountability in terms of who agreed to what
It's really a no-brainer if you want to quickly improve project efficiencies.
A simple solution
Mail Manager, our intuitive Outlook add-in developed by Arup, allows users to look at a project and see exactly what’s happened in the past, what is happening now, and what is incoming. You’re not reliant on a single individual, so if someone leaves the business you still have access to all the project information filed straight away.
In cases where you have to keep information for 10+ years after the project is finished, Mail Manager allows you to keep all that information in one place, rather than dispersed across various different mailboxes.
Being able to filter emails by project means, especially if you only work on one or two at a time, you don’t get inundated with irrelevant emails and the process of finding specific information is made a lot easier. If you need an audit trail or have to retrieve critical information relating to a specific project, that’s vital.
