"Three key words for a successful meeting - Consensus, Commitment, Completion."
One of the biggest complaints I hear from project managers is that too many meetings and they spend too much time in meetings. Designing and leading better meetings will help make better use of project managers' time. By documenting commitments and managing the progress after the meeting, you could make future meetings more productive or even unnecessary.
This is particularly important for project management. In addition to taking and distributing meeting notes on the project site, Action Items are the most important outcomes of a meeting. They should always be clearly documented and need to be tracked to make sure they are finished timely.
I assigned a designated person responsible for this task and any follow-up work that happened. After a meeting, the designated person asks attendees to review and provide any clarifications or corrections within a working day - and republish with those corrections. It is critical to allow action item owners to set their own due dates and once set, to hold them to those dates. The key word here is “consensus”.
The first thing a project manager needs is an approach to facilitate the completion of action items. Make no mistake, the key word here is “completion”. If the process or management plan doesn’t get results, then it’s not working.
Sometimes, the action items are lumped together with a project backlog or an issue log. It is more beneficial though to split it up into separate lists so that different approaches can be used. There is not often a “one size fits all” solution.
The work required for an action item to be done by a few resources that should be completed before the next meeting (in less than one week). Often, this work is too small to be captured in the project backlog or is something that was realized after the project backlog has been prepared.
Usually action items are growing so fast and it is good to categorize well and add dependencies to search easily. These are the attributes of action item I used: "category", "unique action item number", “what needs to be done”, "assigned date", "due date", "last updated date (closed date if it is closed)", “owner”, "status (open, cancelled, closed, deferred)", "associated action item links", "notes or comments", and "outcomes".
It might be good to use a online meeting management application for a big group project.
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