Minute-o-phobia

In a separate post we discussed several different views on the appropriate level of accuracy to include in meeting minutes.  I also noted that even more prevalent than different ways of taking minutes is for a meeting to have no record at all.

We all know that spies and politicians do this, but surely the entire PMBoK is about transparency, consistency and making a record. Yet so many PMs are among those who seldom document a meeting (at least for public consumption; what goes into your little black book for self-protection does not count!)

Why so little practice of transparency?

• Some PMs perhaps think that taking minutes (and more importantly, typing them up) is a secretarial function and they're much too important for that. Bad thinking. If you put the meeting record together you can make sure that the important things are included and that the needed actions are assigned. I certainly wouldn't want to say that you can remember the meeting sort of the way you want to ... but it happens that way sometimes ... don't overdo it.
• I know I often forget, or maybe a day or two of back-to-back meetings overcome your good resolutions, and the next thing you know you are twelve meetings behind and what the heck, nobody will notice missing a week. Which may well be true. And the next thing you know it's a month.
• The committee holding the meeting doesn't bother to read the minutes, offers no corrections or clarifications, and never votes to approve them. Why bother? {Ahem. See the first bullet).
• The committee members don't want to be held accountable for their decisions.  Now we're getting somewhere. Is it that they really don't want anyone to know what they decided? Ask them how anyone is supposed to do what they decided if nobody knows what that is. If you're still not getting any sensible answers after going down this road, consider whether your organization is so process-phobic that trying to implement PPFM is pretty much a waste of time (see the Anti-Maturity posting)
• Actually it's more likely that the members are OK with having votes etc recorded but they don't want a record of who said what in the deliberations leading up to the vote. Well, all right. If that's the only compromise you have to make in implementing your governance process, you are well on your way.

Here's another old favorite: our team is small and everyone knows what's going on. Why waste time on administrative overhead?
Hmm. Ever heard of turnover? Ironically, the logic is almost the reverse: the tighter your group, the harder it is for a new person to come up to operating efficiency. It's amazing how many processes that "everyone knows" turn out to be known in a different way, or not at all, by almost every member of the team. When a new person comes on board, it is of enormous help to be able to take a few hours reading through an abbreviated life history of how we got to where we are. Of course the minutes won't tell you everything you need to know (nor, unfortunately will your new team-mates) but within a few hours hours the newbie is at least familiarized with the issues and the stakeholders.

I'm not insisting that senior managers be the actual scribes or document typists. Go ahead and have someone else do it. As long as it gets done.