minutes to a meeting : Minutes and Group Recording,
In our Meeting Guide on Minutes and Group Recording, we recommend capturing three specific things in your meetings: Decisions, Action Items and Open Issues. This type of record is typically shorter and more useful than the traditional narrative known as "meeting minutes."
A technique for simplifying the capture of these three items is the use of templates. A template, in general, is any system or tool to help guide, form or remind you of some structure. In this case, the structure you want to be reminded of is what to capture in your meeting (namely, the decisions reached, action items assigned, and open issues). How do you implement a template? That really depends on how comfortable you are with various meeting "technologies."
Using templates
Let's start low tech. At the beginning of the meeting, tape three flip-chart sheets to the wall (or better yet, use self-sticking Post-it® Easel Pad sheets) and label one DECISIONS, one ACTION ITEMS and one OPEN ISSUES. As these items occur during the meeting, just add them to the appropriate flip chart. The same approach can be used with a whiteboard, by the way.
Now let's go to "level two" on the meeting technology scale - overhead projectors. Prepare three transparencies just as you did the flip charts and capture the items on them. This is easy to do, and almost every meeting room has an overhead projector. You may want to use colored pens to distinguish the various categories, or alternate between two or three colors for items in a single category to help people scan the different items at a glance.
Level three involves a laptop computer and a multimedia projector. Using this combination allows you to create a template using any software you like. It could be a word processor, presentation software, or even spreadsheet software. The advantage to using a word processor is that you can start with the meeting's agenda, and easily create these three categories under each agenda item. That way, the notes you capture are associated with specific agenda items - and this helps make it clear when in the meeting, for example, the decision was reached. At the end of the meeting this "annotated agenda" automatically becomes a formal record of what happened that can be printed, e-mailed, or filed (electronically, of course!).
©3M 1995-2005
A technique for simplifying the capture of these three items is the use of templates. A template, in general, is any system or tool to help guide, form or remind you of some structure. In this case, the structure you want to be reminded of is what to capture in your meeting (namely, the decisions reached, action items assigned, and open issues). How do you implement a template? That really depends on how comfortable you are with various meeting "technologies."
Using templates
Let's start low tech. At the beginning of the meeting, tape three flip-chart sheets to the wall (or better yet, use self-sticking Post-it® Easel Pad sheets) and label one DECISIONS, one ACTION ITEMS and one OPEN ISSUES. As these items occur during the meeting, just add them to the appropriate flip chart. The same approach can be used with a whiteboard, by the way.
Now let's go to "level two" on the meeting technology scale - overhead projectors. Prepare three transparencies just as you did the flip charts and capture the items on them. This is easy to do, and almost every meeting room has an overhead projector. You may want to use colored pens to distinguish the various categories, or alternate between two or three colors for items in a single category to help people scan the different items at a glance.
Level three involves a laptop computer and a multimedia projector. Using this combination allows you to create a template using any software you like. It could be a word processor, presentation software, or even spreadsheet software. The advantage to using a word processor is that you can start with the meeting's agenda, and easily create these three categories under each agenda item. That way, the notes you capture are associated with specific agenda items - and this helps make it clear when in the meeting, for example, the decision was reached. At the end of the meeting this "annotated agenda" automatically becomes a formal record of what happened that can be printed, e-mailed, or filed (electronically, of course!).
©3M 1995-2005
posted by applecentre at 1:19 AM
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