Member Q&A – Whose responsibility is it to approve meeting minutes?

Member Question
Whose responsibility is it to approve meeting minutes—the original version and/or the edited version?

—Sue, Project Manager (government agency)

Thanks for writing, Sue. As with so many things, this depends on the dynamics of your organization and your team. But a fairly safe bet is to make the approval of minutes a collective activity. If we assume that the goal of using minutes in the first place is to provide an accurate historical reference and to insure everyone agrees on assignments, it's easy to see that group approvals are far more useful than the memory of any single individual. Leaving one person in sole charge of approving meeting minutes is likely to produce a rapid exercise in frustration. So the short answer to your question about who should approve minutes is this: "Everyone." But this can and should be a quick, painless, and simple process. Here are a few ways it can work.

For a small, informal team meeting with everyone in attendance: Publish draft minutes to the team as soon as possible after the meeting—preferably within an hour, while it's still fresh in everyone's mind. Email would be a very easy way to do this, but group collaboration spaces might be used as well. Attendees should indicate their agreement within a set timeframe by either posting a quick "OK/Looks good" or by submitting any requested edits or additions. The project manager or someone appointed by the PM would then reconcile all the input and publish a final "approved" version of the minutes to the team.

For a meeting with a subset of a larger team: Publish draft minutes to the attendees for their review as soon as possible after the meeting, as above. The project manager or someone appointed by the PM would then reconcile all the input and publish a final "approved" version of the minutes as appropriate.

For larger meetings: These meetings are more likely to have official recorders dedicated to that job (as opposed to the meeting leader also serving as facilitator and recorder). In this case, the meeting recorder would publish draft minutes to the attendees immediately after the meeting and be responsible for reconciling all the input. The final minutes would be published as appropriate after that. In very formal settings, the minutes wouldn't be considered approved until they were reviewed and approved at the next meeting—that's very Roberts' Rules of Order and not appropriate for most environments, but it's surely not uncommon in government work.

In any of these situations, whether or not silence implies approval of the draft minutes should be dictated by the circumstances. In most situations that is probably the case, but it some environments it might be more appropriate to require explicit approval, and to phone or IM people to get it if needed.

It is rare in my experience for any of these scenarios to reveal any direct contradictions, but if they do occur it should be up to the project manager (on smaller teams or for critical issues) or the meeting leader (on larger teams or for minor issues) to resolve the issue with the people involved. Practically speaking, this will usually fall to the PM.

While most items in your minutes will be pretty close to the mark, you may find that action items are a special case. It's not uncommon for meeting attendees to submit clarifications or questions on action items. The phrasing chosen in the draft may not quite match their understanding. While it can be time-consuming to sort through these issues, they represent the primary value of the meeting minutes in general; that is, making sure everyone agrees on assignments and leaves the meeting with the same understanding of actions, decisions, etc. Getting everyone to read the minutes and ask those questions gives you a mechanism for insuring that understanding.

When it's critically important to clarify these items, it can be tempting to do it right on the spot, by reading through everything at the end of the meeting. Resist the temptation! More often than not, this will turn into ten or fifteen minutes of laborious, painstaking word smithing as everyone drudges through multiple items after an already long (and sometimes emotional) meeting. It can be valuable to review actions items—not minutes—right at the end of a meeting, provided you can control yourself and not make everyone sit there while one person tries to take dictation. Armed with that very quick clarification, you can then publish the draft minutes immediately after the meeting, confident that most of the potential wrinkles have already been ironed out. It should be even easier to get everyone to add their official stamp of approval so you can publish the final, group-approved minutes and add them to the project history.

While having the attendees formally review and approve minutes may sound bureaucratic, it doesn't have to be excruciatingly formal. The idea is just to get everyone to spend a minute or two looking to make sure there are no disagreements and that they really have signed up to everything they were signed up for. That very short span of time is enough to surface problems that could become major issues down the road, like disagreements around ownership of a task or issue resolution, choice of a particular solution to an issue, etc. We've all experienced frustration of forgetting what decision was made, or even if a decision was made. If done well and consistently, minutes can alleviate that problem almost completely. (There will always be those hallway meetings—pickup meetings, my husband calls them—that result in undocumented decisions or task assignments; all we can do as project managers is try to keep tabs on those and deal with them as we run across them.)

I hope this answers your question, Sue. I don't claim it's the only viewpoint, but it's one that has served me well through the years. Please fold, spindle, and mutilate as you see fit for your group, and let us know if it helps. And don't hesitate to ask if you have any more questions.

©Copyright 2000-2008 Emprend, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
About us   Site Map   View current sponsorship opportunities (PDF)
Contact us for more information or e-mail info@projectconnections.com
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy