Minutes of Meeting

Meeting Minutes is the document used by organizations to record the items discussed during any business meeting. Most organizations have a predefined template for this document and the the captured information is formatted using that template. The minutes of meeting document is used for recording meeting notes and is usually sent out to the meeting attendees to maintain a proper documentation of the items discussed during the meetings.

Usually one of the meeting attendees is responsible for taking down notes and converting those notes to Meeting Minutes. The items discussed during a meeting are usually classified under two broad categories:

1) Meeting Notes

2) Action Items

Meeting Notes are any kind of notes that are captured during the meeting and have a significant relevance to the agenda for the meeting.

Action items are the type of notes that specify a certain task to be accomplished by certain date by a certain person.

Apart from the notes and action items the other important sections of a meeting minutes document includes the meeting agenda which is sent prior to the meeting and the list of attendees for the meeting.

It is very common for organizations to create a minutes of meeting document using a Microsoft Word template. A lot of less organized companies just type the minutes of a meeting in an email and email it to the attendees and any other relevant person.

Sounds like a very simple exercise but is often the most useful outcome of business meetings. Meetings without a meeting minutes document are usually very unproductive because there is no record of what was discussed and there is no way to track and follow up on the items that were discussed.

Now imagine being part of two to three meetings a day and keeping track of the meeting minutes for all of them. That would produce between 40 - 50 meeting minutes document a month. That is a lot of document to manage and keep track of. It is nearly impossible for a person to go back and refer to those documents for important notes as the amount of meeting minutes keep increasing on a daily basis.

We were dealing with similar challenges of managing the meeting minutes produced at our company. It was also a huge challenge to keep up with the number of meetings and record the meeting minutes in a well formatted document each time. Maintaining the document format in itself was a time taking endeavor and the formats were never consistent because these documents were created by different individuals with different writing styles.

Finally we found a way to record consistent looking minutes of meeting where all we focussed was on taking down the notes for the meeting. You must be wondering how?

You can get the answer at http://www.minutesofmeeting.net