Meeting Minutes

Produce meeting minutes and distribute them afterward to all attendees.

Unless you write down all the findings, conclusions, and actions resulting from a meeting, then that meeting might as well never have happened. Said another way, you cannot assume that anything discussed during a meeting will be put into action-- or even remembered. To ensure accountability and follow-through, meeting minutes need to be distributed after the meeting-- and then agreed upon.

Said simply, people's perceptions and recollections fade and morph with time. We're human, so we're fallible and forgetful. Further, what one person thought was agreed upon in a meeting might be different than what another person thought. Meeting minutes help solve this problem. You and I get together to discuss a problem. After some back-and-forth, we agree on a solution. I get some of the action items, and you get some.  Meeting minutes document these findings and actions in a way that ambiguity and misunderstanding between us is lessened.

Good meeting minutes should be simple to read. They shouldn't be a verbatim accounting of the entire discussion. Making the minutes dense and wordy lessens the chances that anyone will fully read them. People are busy, and giving someone a long-winded recap of a meeting afterward, where they have to tease out conclusions, findings, and action items wastes that persons time.

Good meeting summary minutes should include:

• Date of meeting
• Subject of meeting
• Attendees
• Bulleted list of key findings, decisions, and conclusions
• Separate bulleted list of action items, including assignees and due dates
• A proposed date, time, and location for any required follow-up meetings.

Some other do's and don'ts:

• Be objective. Just state facts, findings, and conclusions. Avoid personal observations. 
• Write in the same tense throughout.
• If you need to refer to other documents, attach them or provide a link where they may be found. Don’t rewrite their intent or try to summarize them.

After meeting minutes are distributed, ask for everyone's email approval or comments/edits in writing. Give them a due date, typically a day or two, to respond. A simple written "Yes, I agree with the findings of these minutes and the assigned action items" email reply from the attendees is sufficient. Assuming someone agrees with your minutes because/if they don't respond is tantamount to them disagreeing. Get everyone's written buy-in.

Some projects use a formal template to document minutes. Depending upon the rigor and formality of your project, you can implement a standardized template or just use email.

On our project, we typically just use email for capturing meeting minutes, but once these minutes are distributed and approved by all the attendees, the action items often then get transferred into a more formal Rolling Action Item List (RAIL) so that they can be formally tracked and monitored.

A little bit of time turning your meeting notes into formal minutes, distributing them, and receiving written approval of them, will help ensure communications and responsibilities within your project are well understood.

Bottom Line: Take the time to produce accurate meeting minutes and distribute them after a meeting-- this reduces misunderstandings and ensures everyone knows what their follow-on action items are.

© Copyright 2014 Mark H.Warner. All rights reserved.

The Need for Travel

When planning a project, it's important to budget for travel.

Even in today's modern world, with high-speed internet connectivity, video conferencing, applications like join.me and go-to-meeting, Skype, email, IM, texts, smart phones, 4G hotspots, etc… there still is no substitute for face-to-face, in-person meetings. This is especially true for critical WBS items for which you're responsible. And even more so when you're remotely interacting with colleagues and contractors working in foreign countries, where nuances in language are literally lost in translation.

Presence matters.

Face-to-face matters.

Presence lends an air of conviction and importance that a telephone call or email normally can't carry with it.

If you can, meet face-to-face, and this in turn means you need to have sufficient budget to allow for travel. On our big, 50-person, international multi-year project, we have allocated just under $8M for staff travel over the 10-year life of the project. This works out to be about 2.2% of the entire $350M project, or roughly $16K per person per year. This might seem high to new project managers in the planning stages of a project, but on our project we have dozens of contractors located around the globe, including significant work that is performed in Europe. We also have four headquarters sites (three on continental US, and one in Hawaii).

When we started, we knew that we would be in planes, trains, and automobiles for significant periods of time. Our engineers performed bottom-up travel estimates on a work package by work package basis, focusing on the expected number of support trips needed, including the number of people we had to have at those meetings. Travel costs were then calculated and rolled up into a set of high-level management travel accounts; the estimates were performed bottom-up, but we manage the money top down.

Budgeting at these levels allows our engineers, managers, and scientists to be where they need to be to perform their job duties-- without management discouraging said travel because it's squeezing the overall budget. In other words, we planned for this expense from the start, so expectations in this area were managed from the beginning.

Allowing engineers, managers, and scientists to be where they need to be has paid significant dividends in the form of reduced errors, mistakes, schedule slips, and of course change orders. There is a marked difference is contract performance at those contractors that we support heavily with travel vs. those that we don't visit as often. Travel not only keeps the engineers well informed of progress and issues in near-real time, but it lets the contractor see firsthand that a) we care about what they're doing; b) we expect to see regular progress; and c) we're helping them solve problems as they arise, not afterward when it's often too late. Our contractors have told us they feel more a sense of being part of a team then just as a supplier. Presence lends conviction.

Bottom Line: Budget correctly for travel at the beginning of a project-- it is vitally important to success.

© Copyright 2014 Mark H.Warner. All rights reserved.