Meetings are an everyday part of a PM’s life. We have meetings to align a team’s efforts, receive reports on work done, issues encountered, risk uncovered and to make plans for our next steps. Those plans will include schedules, action items, roles and responsibilities, coordination of work, etc. After an hour of discussion, there are a lot of details to keep in one head. To come away with useful information, someone must distill it all down into concise, readable notes.
Notes by themselves are not necessarily valuable. What makes notes valuable is the thought and interpretation that is put into making them. Some characteristics of useful notes are:
- Clearly stated
- Easily read
- Captures the meat of the discussion with enough detail to be unambiguous.
- Does not add any bias – “…just the facts mam.”
- Follows the flow of the discussion but at the same time groups related items together
- Formatted to allow easy scanning
Achieving these traits requires that you become fully engaged with the group and immersed in the discussions. You cannot be “multi-tasking” or allow distractions to intrude. Your mind must be fully engaged in the discussions taking place, no matter what the subject. It could be a detailed technical discussion or a completely foreign political discussion or something in between.
Being engaged means you are part of the discussion. This means that when you do not understand what is being said, it is a good idea to ask questions to clarify what you are hearing. At a pause point in the discussion it is a good practice to paraphrase what you think you heard and ask for confirmation that it is correct. Upon confirmation, write down a bullet point type note that sums up the meat of the matter. By following this process throughout the meeting you will find that you end up with a set of notes that covers the full range of the discussion.
All of the above is just practicing good communication skills. You get the best exchange of ideas when you both listen and confirm what you are hearing and in turn seek confirmation of what you are saying from your audience. It is this give and take that allows understanding between people to occur.
Once the meeting is over, you should take your notes and turn them into a published set of notes. You need to do this as soon as you can after the completion of the meeting. Basic notes scribbled down or quickly typed are usually incomprehensible to anyone but the person that created them. They need to be fleshed out with proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.
Another thing that needs to be done when you edit the notes is to put them together in logical groups. Sometimes this might be in the order in which things were said, but quite often it is out of order but placed in relation to similar subjects and ideas. I like to use ordered lists with indentation such as below.
- Main thought
- sub thought
- sub thought
Be sure that you keep your audience in mind when you are editing your notes. Remember that some or maybe most of the people reviewing the notes were not part of the conversation. Therefore, be sure to provide proper background such as names and places and be specific about which he, she or it you are referring to in a sentence. A good way to make sure you are doing this is to write the notes with the idea that you may be looking at them a year from now trying to figure out what was being said and why decisions were being made.
The road to good notes is:
- Being engaged in the conversation
- Using good communication skills
- When editing, organize them for relevance
- Keep your audience in mind
- Strive for clarity
Please feel free to use the space below to make comments or ask questions.