Meeting without action items looks like chatter.
But it’s STILL CHATTER if action items were defined, but not checked how they are handled.
I think you will easily remind such kind of meeting when action items are defined in words or even defined in the follow-up email, but not handled or just forgotten after the next followup.
I’ve asked myself how to make the action items not be blah-blah-blah items, but action items: when people will return to them till they are not done.
Actions items should initiate real actions!
On the last projects, I’ve moved from followup emails to Meeting Log.
And it works great!
Meeting Log is a simple Confluence page with the history of the meeting.
It’s just simple grid with the following columns:
- Date and Type – date of the meeting (in the past or in future), and type (i.e. Technical, Weekly etc).
- Agenda: Reporter + Agenda. It’s easy now to plan the future meetings. All team members can easily to add items for the meeting in the future etc.
- Action Items: Actor + Action. Action initially marked by some visible sign that it should be handled by Actor. During the next meeting, we check the items with signs and remove them if the action is performed. It can be different results of action: email is sent, the ticket is assigned etc
It looks like this:
With such a simple solution, our action items mean real action: we’re returning to the items with a sign and check them till they are not completed with any result.
The only problem you will meet is to make it filled by the responsible team members. In my case it was easy: BA fills it instead of follow-up, TL fills technical log to not forget what was discussed and what tickets should be created.
I hope it will be helpful for you!
Don’t hesitate to put your comments if you’ve any questions. Thanks!
Side note: Confluence provides a rich set of macros to make this process easy and good looking (i.e. generation of the question mark, select date, select actor etc)
Open questions:
- Is it possible for Artificial Intelligence to take this routine with Meeting Log filling?
- Probably in Confluence we need to use checkboxes instead of questions marks.
SB's 