How to Not Fumble Ingenious Ideas and Brilliant Decisions Reached at a Meeting

Updated on Feb. 07, 2020:  We’ve stopped support of Roadmap Planner but the Roadmap feature is now available in our new goal-oriented platform – Goals by KeepSolid. This business solution provides the same opportunities to plan and execute your strategies and even more. Check out Goals by KeepSolid and stay tuned for its updates!

One of the ways how you can screw up an otherwise perfectly conducted meeting is poor organization. Often, and this is the topic we’ll be discussing today, it manifests in crudely organized minutes of meeting, if any. What is minutes of meeting? Why is this such an essential aspect? How to write minutes of meeting? Read on to find out!

What is minutes of meeting?

In our recent article, we’ve discussed the cost of meetings. If you’ve read it, you now understand how much money a strategy meeting by top execs can drain, and what a bummer it is when all that effort goes, well, down the drain. Also in that piece we’ve mentioned how professional planning tools can assist with writing meeting notes. But what is minutes of meeting, exactly?

Minutes of meeting (MoM), minutes, or protocols, are the written record of a hearing or meeting. They recount the events of the meeting, its agenda, attendees, and decisions. Their main purpose is to document all important outtakes and resolutions reached for any stakeholders to review afterwards. NOT to be confused with transcripts of the proceeding – the minutes have to record not what was said, but what was done.

There is no rigorous form for MoM, it’s completely at the host’s disposal. Some enjoy it concise, like a list of discussed topics, while others can go as far as composing separate documents for each protocol.

Why do you need minutes of meeting?

Meeting notes are crucial for following up with the event’s participants. In the heat of a strategy meeting, discussing matters of life and death (of a business, at least), it’s difficult to keep every bit of important information in mind. Especially if this includes long-term solutions, while a person is most concerned with current ongoing problems. Double especially if implementing those solutions isn’t directly the person’s responsibility.

It’s not uncommon for action items that were defined at a meeting to go unresolved or unassigned to a concrete executive or department. To avoid such situations, and to keep all stakeholders on the same page, meeting minutes should be properly written and distributed.

If that wasn’t enough, getting the results of the meeting across to all concerned employees can be plain out expensive. Someone is going to need a reminder, a couple workers will need to clarify something, others will want a guideline of sorts… A person responsible for this will quickly realize how many man hours could be spared by optimizing the whole process, like sharing a single link to notes with everyone. This is where meeting minutes come in.

How to write minutes of meeting?

To fulfill the aforementioned goals, minutes of meeting should list the most important information. A sample of minutes taken at a meeting would include:

1. Date & time of the meeting
2. List of attendees (also wouldn’t hurt to add their contact info if it wasn’t an internal meeting)
3. Agenda (topics)
4. DIscussions and conclusions
5. Action items and delegated tasks (extra important!)
6. (Optional) – next steps, follow-up events, etc.

A small hint – things are easier to manage when they are organized and kept clear. That’s why we don’t recommend to use too many specialized tools for different tasks, instead utilizing those with vast feature pools.

One of such convenient, all-in-one services is a professional planning tool by KeepSolid called Roadmap Planner. While it was designed for building strategic roadmaps of all sorts of scopes, it’s super-convenient to use the app to record meeting minutes. Just create a Backlog in the relevant project and document the minutes there. Every team member that you invite to the document will then be able to review the protocol. You can even drag&drop the note to the project, creating a task right away. Let no task slip away from your attention ever again!