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You can use project meeting minutes to capture the activities and action items that occurred during a project meeting and to communicate that information to anyone interested. Project meeting min-utes enable anyone interested in the project to learn what occurred and what was committed to during the meeting. Meeting minutes are helpful for those team members who could not attend the meeting. Project managers should take meeting minutes or have someone capture those meeting minutes for them. (We recommend that project managers ask someone else to take the minutes — it’s difficult to run the meeting at the same time.) The minutes’ taker should capture as much relevant information as possible and leave all the extra discussions or noise out of the meeting minutes.

The Project Management Institute’s knowledge area for this tool is the Integration area.

This tool works in every other knowledge area as well.

We have included a sample of the Project Meeting Minutes tool in the Integration folder on the CD-ROM.

Project meeting minutes are a document of what occurred during the meeting, which provides everyone with knowledge and identifies accountability for what was said and agreed upon at the meeting.

Project meeting minutes are the notes taken that capture the action items and main points that rose

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customers for their review of the issues and action items. You should follow through on the action items. Doing this is an important step in your ongoing project communication management because the continuous flow of project information to your stakeholders and team members is invaluable.

You might want to capture a certain part of a meeting such as a subject matter expert’s material to make sure the communication is accurate. If this were necessary, you would record only that part of the meeting for future playback. You can use a number of recording tools such as the Dictaphone, computer camera, tape recorder, movie, camcorder, and so on.

Figure 4.1 represents common meeting minutes for a typical project. (Look on this book’s CD for a copy.)

An excellent tip for taking meeting minutes is to capture the action items from the last meeting and bring them forward to the current meeting to ensure that nothing is lost from week to week. Often project managers miss this and assume that their team members will perform the action items cap-tured in the last meeting. Most team members require that extra push to ensure they remember the action items assigned to them, and bringing them forward on a week-to-week basis reduces the chances of them forgetting.

Meeting minutes are great communication tools because they communicate the action items and outcomes from a meeting event. One of the best practices is for the project managers to communi-cate meeting minutes at the end of every meeting by sending out those minutes and relevant action items to all stakeholders, and project team members. The project manager should also post those minutes within the document control system for easy access and review. By doing so, you are con-tinuing the ongoing project communications with your interested stakeholders, thus keeping proj-ect information flowing. Projproj-ect managers should also follow up on each issue or action item during the week to ensure that the team is making progress on the items. As action items complete, the project manager should communicate this to everyone on the team.

As the project progresses and you or your team members capture the meeting minutes on a week-to-week basis, these minutes become invaluable. This repository is a wealth of project information that is valuable to the project team, customers, and other stakeholders. When it is necessary to look back at past decisions or discussion points, the first place to review is the historical repository of meeting minutes. This information becomes easy to use and to find the information you are searching for. The meeting minutes become a source for to-do lists (action items) or formal project tasks. The action items in the weekly minutes carry through each week until they are completed or noted, then dropped.

Capturing the lessons learned information during the course of the meeting is a best practice tech-nique. In Figure 4.1, you noticed that there is an agenda item called “This Week’s Lessons

Learned.” During that time on the agenda, the project manager opens the subject to the meeting attendees and notes the lessons learned (What went right? And what went wrong?) for the week.

The compiling of this information each week will eliminate the lessons learned meeting(s) at the end of the project. Then at the end of the project, the project manager just summarizes the lessons learned log to complete the lessons learned document and presentation. The project manager then

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Defining Communication Tools to Manage Project Integration 4

FIGURE 4.1

This figure represents a typical set of meeting minutes from a project.

Project Name

All members of the project team should use the project meeting minutes to review and recap what occurred. Individuals will have different purposes for how and why they will utilize the meeting minutes but generally each will be looking for specific action items assigned to them. The project manager and team members should ensure that they make the meeting minutes available to the project’s stakeholders, so there is full disclosure, and anyone wanting to see what occurred during the meeting can access the project information if needed.

The accuracy of meeting minutes is crucial. In some cases, these documents are valu-able in litigation, so project managers ensure that they keep them current and as accu-rate as possible.