Quick Minutes – Quick meeting minutes are better than no meeting minutes.

As a PM you usually have the task of creating minutes after meetings.  Important or client meetings usually have formal minutes published.  Team meetings or quick meeting sometimes are not.  Let’s face it, meeting minutes are not one of the most interesting tasks of our role, but they are required.  You need to capture the discussion points, decisions and action items.  The best way to do this is via what I call Quick Minutes

The point of Quick minutes is to capture the salient points and all action items in the meeting.  The minutes do not have to be verbose and packed with the details of the conversation.  Just capture the most important parts of the discussion. Action items still should contain the task, who’s responsible and a target date.  If you are using an overall project action log, you can capture the new action items there

Here’s a sample of what I call “Quick Minutes” usually emailed out by end of day of the meeting to all the participants or stakeholders. 

Quick Minutes/Notes from today’s meeting

1)      Testing is delayed, additional two weeks required.  Project can absorb the delay.  Pushes date to June 19^th.

2)      Three UAT environments being developed.  Will be complete by Monday May 18^th.

3)      New report mock-ups required – Action BA – confirm requirements by May 20^th, DEV Complete by May 27^th.

4)      User Guide Updates - New date TBD (action – BA Date for a date by end of week.)

5)      Confirm/Meeting with John to discuss UAT testing (action PM - ASAP)

6)      Penetration Testing – Needs to be performed vs a FI instance in UAT. 

7)      Identified Dependency: IMPORTANT: Identified project is impacted by project ABC.  Action – PM: Inform stakeholders ASAP.  Impact to deployment timelines.

The minutes are very loose and free-form, but contain the key items from the meeting.  The above Quick Minutes are better suited to internal team communications.  If you are sending quick minutes to a customer or vendor you may consider additional formality and content. It depends on your audience and the relationship you have with them.

I’m not suggesting that all meeting minutes be captured this way.  But, if you’re cramped for time and have important notes and actions that do need to be captured, you can use some Quick Minutes.