PM Toolkit - Meeting Minutes

I am starting off a series of posts on the essential tools needed by a PM in his line of work. It is quite often that we expect PM's to already "get it" as far as what we expect a good PM to be doing. However, this is not always the case. PM's have an idea on what should be done and how its supposed to be done, but quite commonly, PM's have no idea on how to do it correctly and why in the first place. Hence these succeeding posts aims to help the PM in understanding the common tools of the trade. These are common items, such as documentation, templates, or activities/steps that a PM is expected to do, and do quite well at.

Tool : Meeting Minutes
Type: Document

The Meeting Minutes (or MoM) in some circles is probably the most underutilized tool of all. The objective of the MoM is to document two distinct things that occur in a meeting.

1. What has been decided on during the meeting - which should contain who decided on what and why (if needed)
2. What are the next steps / action items - which should include target completion dates and specific people assigned to it. It is important to write down an actual name rather than just "customer" or "project team" since it transfers the accountability to a specific person. If an activity is dependent on certain conditions, include the fulfillment of the conditions as another action item on the list.

Of course, it is also important to include other information in the MoM such as when the meeting was held, who attended, what items were discussed, and so on... but not having the two items above will call into question the whole point on why a meeting took place. If it can't satisfy at least one of the two points, then there is probably no point to having a meeting in the first place.

Note that although some people may argue that some meetings are mainly to convey information (like status reporting meetings, etc.) , it is considered an "agreement" if the receiving party accepts the information conveyed to them. In some cases as well, people have "agreed" to disagree on certain topics during the meeting hence this constitute a relevant meeting that needs to be properly documented.

Meeting Minutes do not end in just being able to write it down. It is important to publish the MoM to the rest of the participants for their feedback and review. It is also important to keep the MoM in a location that can be easily retrievable by all, such as a shared drive, or a similar facility.

A seasoned PM knows that MoM can make or break a project. A lot of decisions happen that change the course of a project during these short and seemingly insignificant "meetings". I believe some of you out there have experienced times wherein somebody said something that we all agreed to do - but later on was "denied" by the person who said it - and we got in trouble because of that. I believe you would all agree that the situation could've come out differently had we documented the situation properly.

Managing Projects is all about managing change. Change can only be managed if you know what are the things that are changing. We can only know what things are changing if we document them. The best avenue to document the changes in a project is via the MoM - hence its significance.

Lastly, as my old boss told me... "Doing the Meetings Minutes gives you the privilege of documenting YOUR version of the truth."

...now isn't that something worth documenting?