Editors Note: This Meeting Agenda & Minutes template is one in a series of templates to help readers plan and manage communications and content management activities, resources and deliverables. We welcome ideas and suggestions for other Template Tuesday materials.
Definition:
The Meeting Agenda & Minutes Template contains two sections: the agenda portion of this template provides an organized agenda to send out to team members before meetings. The meeting minutes portion can be used to capture notes, action items, and outstanding questions to send to attendees after the meeting.
Purpose:
Every organization holds meetings, often in person in a conference room, or virtually on a conference call. The value of connecting and working together is often lost when meeting facilitators operate without an organized plan for covering topics and meeting objectives without getting derailed. A well-crafted agenda provides the project specifics, meeting location details, leadership details, and identifies any documents that need to be reviewed ahead of time.
The items to include in an agenda and in the follow-up minutes vary based on the type of project and meeting. For example, for a development project with system impacts, one topic may cover various design changes to screens and keys. Another topic may reference process changes that require new instructions to be written.
Meeting minutes capture and clarify the details discussed in a meeting and create a “paper” trail of decisions, challenges, and action items that are often useful when project timelines are in jeopardy or senior leaders question who made decisions and when.
Relevance:
Both planned and ad hoc meetings come up often, and participant schedules can be hard to manage. Professional communicators who are skilled at creating and managing multiple documents and in-depth content, might overlook simpler organizational documents such as agendas and meeting minutes. This template helps simplify the process of staying organized for meetings and providing relevant project details to team members.
Using the Template:
- Download the Meeting Agenda & Minutes Template in MS Word (143 kb).
- Review the content areas and customize for your product and company.
- Set your desired branding elements (change colors and fonts, add a logo).
- Tailor the agenda to a specific meeting by filling in the details.
- Attach any related documents and/or include links for review.
- Send the agenda to meeting invitees.
- Use the minutes section to capture details during the meeting.
- Following the meeting, organize, clarify and refine the details as needed.
- Send the captured minutes to all attendees and invitees.
Do you have other templates that work well for the products you are documenting? Are you in an Agile development environment and have tools for creating user assistance that aligns with Sprints? Feel free to contact us and submit your templates. We’ll provide credit to you for assisting the TechWhirl community and contributing to Template Tuesdays.
