Note to self - take meeting notes

I posted quite awhile ago about taking effective notes. The problem is that this is a hard discipline to keep up with - and I have been slipping. This has become incredibly apparent one several projects recently.

When you work with different business units/groups, you would think that everyone would work together and see the final project and end result would be something easy to keep people motivated towards. Throughout this, you would also think that people could take their own notes and actually pay attention during status and planning meetings - however this is not always a reality.

To be fair - this does happen quite often where I work and it is an amazing feeling to be part of a 'rock star' group of people.

However there are times that instead of being focused people come, drift in and out of attention and then when it comes crunch time get into a 'he said, she said' battle of words rather then just sucking up and doing their part.

The problem is that the biggest part of the whole piece that is missing is what the manager (in this case that would be me) should be doing, which is keeping notes, and making sure that everyone understands what the goals are and what the deadlines are and are in agreement on these things. Thus when it comes down to it, I am the biggest offender.

So note to self - do not slip into the complacent mode - take notes and make sure that people are actually 'on the same page'.