- Table of contents
- Meeting Minutes
Meeting Minutes¶
Each team is responsible to post the minutes of a meeting to EDN, typically in the Project Management forum for their project. This provides a record of the decision making processes used during the project. Meeting minutes allow missing members of your team to stay up to date. This includes your Client, Project Engineer and Chief Engineer!
This task should rotate among the team members, to ensure every student generates at least one memo. These minutes should summarize important activities and progress during the course of the semester and include a list of weekly assigned tasks, responsibilities for completing tasks, and estimated time and resources for completion. The team should maintain an updated list of action items as a regular component of the minutes of a meeting. It should highlight any issues that the team is facing and corresponding actions that the team is taking to solve problems. Create a forum thread for each meeting in the Project Management forum ex: Project Mgmt >> 10/3 class meeting . In that thread should be the agenda, the minutes and later, updates/corrections to the minutes. Avoid attaching a Word file because attachments are not searchable in the EDN.
In general the meeting minutes should record:- Date/time of the meeting
- who took the minutes
- who is present, who was missing
- If no one missed the meeting, state the fact, i.e. None.
- document late arrivals and early departures as needed
- the agenda items that were discussed / key discussion points
- results of the discussions, ex: decisions reached
- action items including (who / what / when):
- description of the item
- who owns the item / who will do the item
- the due date for the item / when it will be available to the team
- if no action item was identified, document the fact, i.e. "No action item was identified."
EDN's issues tool provides an excellent method for recording these action items. Simply use the "To Do" category and if all the fields are filled in you will have an accurate record of the who / what / when aspects for each! You can then track progress of these on EDN by simply updating the status regularly.
DO NOT take your minutes in Word/Open Office and then attach a "doc" file. It is MUCH easier on the reader to see the information directly in the posting rather than having to open a document to get it. Even worse is to paste the text into the posting AND still attach the same thing as a "DOC" file! Now the reader has to open the attachment only to find that it's the same as the text in the posting. Posting as plain text also allows easy searching for information using EDN's search functionality.
DO post a picture or a photo of your whiteboard as an attachment.
Template¶
A simple template has been created - export:template documents/Meeting Minutes.txt - please used this.
This is a text file that you can edit for your meeting minutes. Please do not use word processing tools such as Word as they will introduce formatting problems. Please do NOT attach the file! Instead, copy & paste the text directly into the EDN comment box for proper formatting.